


so you say you want a deathbed scene

by featherx



Series: requests [16]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Childhood Friends to Lovers, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Inspired by Richard Siken, M/M, Masturbation, Minor Linhardt von Hevring/My Unit | Byleth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:54:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 43,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23856430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/featherx/pseuds/featherx
Summary: “You should eat. You’re really thin. I bet that’s why the bullies went after you.”“Because I’m thin?” Yuri mutters, looking amused.“Because you look easy to push around.” Ashe frowns. He has a feeling he’s going to be doing that a lot with Yuri. “If we’re friends, I’ll make sure to protect you if anyone goes after you again. But no one should be going after you in the first place!”
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert/Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc
Series: requests [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1388335
Comments: 18
Kudos: 137





	1. you wanted to be in love

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, thank you ❤ if i got your email right, you requested for yuriashe before, so here is another one! this was supposed to be 10k, but it spiraled completely out of control, just like my life.
> 
> \- special thanks to [phaedin](https://twitter.com/phaedinphaedout) ([AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unchartedandunknown/pseuds/unchartedandunknown)) for keeping me company throughout the grind 😔✊ check out their yuriashe fics for some good food!!!  
> \- this is based off [this richard siken poem](https://anotherhand.livejournal.com/40250.html), which i think everyone has read at least once, but here it is in case you want to read it again anyway.  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- there's barely any actual yuriashe in this first chapter, it's really more of ashe's montage of failed relationships  
> \- the aforementioned failed relationships in case you want to be warned of light angst: one-sided ashe/linhardt, one-sided dimiashe, FWBs ashelix
> 
>  **TW** : drowning in the first part of the first scene. (no one dies but. well. they come close)

1

Ashe is ten, almost eleven, when they meet.

It’s 5 o’clock. Christophe has after-school classes and soccer club practice, so Ashe wanders around the school with no particular destination in mind. He goes to the gardens first, because it’s easiest to pretend he’s an adventurer in the middle of a forest there, finding new medicinal plants (white-petaled flowers) and noting down interesting species of monsters (a bright orange butterfly), but the gardener chases him out after a few minutes. He tries the library, but it’s only open to the older students this late in the day—he heads to the playground, but there aren’t any other kids his age.

So Ashe walks through the hallways, ventures into parts of the school he hasn’t seen yet, areas he knows he isn’t allowed in—the empty high school classrooms, a deserted room that once belonged to a literature club, a storage room filled to the brim with memorabilia. Ashe picks through them all until his hands are black with dust, making up stories for each item he finds. Sometimes he tires of waiting for his older brother like this all the time, because there are only so many things to do alone in school, but Ashe has grown used to it—and anyway, it leads to him making more discoveries like this, even if it is just a dark, dank storage room that smells of wet rat.

And then, as he clambers down steep metal stairs that jar his legs with each step, he hears it. A _splash,_ when he had just passed by the empty swimming pool earlier.

Silently, Ashe hurries over to the swimming pool, the stink of chlorine in the air so heavy it’s almost tangible. The usually-locked gate leading to it has been left ajar, and Ashe peers inside, squinting at a cluster of figures at the far end of the pool. Late afternoon sunlight is streaming in, and the ceiling shimmers with reflections of the glittering water.

“ _Freak!_ ”

The voice echoes through the room, and then—

 _Splash,_ again, and only now does Ashe’s vision sharpen enough for him to see one of the boys, blonde and green-eyed, standing at the edge of the pool. He shoves someone’s head down into the water—and _holds_ them there.

Their—victim, Ashe supposes is an appropriate word—struggles uselessly, thin flailing arms sending ripples out across the water. They’re short and small, and no match for the boy who lifts their head up just long enough for them to take a deep, desperate breath of air.

Long enough for them to lock eyes with Ashe, all the way across the room.

For a long, cold second, Ashe does not move.

And then the boy pushes them down again, laughing all the while. His friends—two of them, one flanking each of his sides—are saying something, but Ashe can only hear a ringing in his ears.

Ashe had gotten in a fight once. The situation had been fairly similar—someone was picking on his younger sister, and he had jumped in to help her. He’d been promptly beaten black and blue and had to be sent to the infirmary for the rest of the day after he passed out. Afterwards, Christophe had told him, “I can’t say I don’t approve, because I would’ve done the same, but you’re not exactly made of muscle. Either pick your battles and cut your losses, or learn to go around them.”

He turns around and bolts out of the room.

Of all teachers he could have run into, Ashe is glad it’s Professor Manuela who’s nearest—in his panic he can’t even form words, and the most he can manage is to drag her by her long white coat towards the swimming pool. “ _What_ is going on here?” she snaps, first looking at Ashe and then over to the boys, who yelp and scatter at the sight of her. “Oh! No, you come back here, you little rascals!”

But Ashe is less concerned about the fate of the bullies, and more about the student they’d been—he shudders just thinking the words—trying to drown. When he sees nothing and no one else at the edge of the pool, he takes a confused step forward—and then breaks into a run, when he sees the bubbles rising to the surface.

Ashe is weak. Ashe can’t win fights. Ashe certainly can’t swim.

Yet he isn’t thinking when he leaps into the pool, uniform and all, and grabs hold of the body slowly sinking to the bottom.

Briefly, his eyes stinging from the water, his clothes sticking heavily to his skin, Ashe thinks this would look nice in a book—the sunlight dancing across the waves, only reaching until a certain level until it’s completely filtered out, and the darkness of the ocean depths Ashe just barely manages to keep the other student from falling into. His grip on the student’s arm seems to shock them conscious, for all of one second, before their eyes—the color indistinguishable underwater—slip shut again.

Then he drags the both of them back up to the surface, and immediately both oxygen and logical thinking return to Ashe—this isn’t the ocean, this is his school, and the student in his arms isn’t moving. “Hello?” Ashe tries, ignoring the tremble in his voice. “Are you—Are you awake? Hello?”

Had Ashe been too late? Had it taken him a second too long to find Professor Manuela, a minute too long to reach the swimming pool, an hour too long to go down the stairs? Had he witnessed someone drown, and, inadvertently, let it happen?

“Wake up,” he whispers, staring down at the student’s face. This close, Ashe can finally tell that the student’s a boy, with long purple hair and the prettiest eyelashes Ashe has ever seen. “Please be okay.”

He almost doesn’t notice when Professor Manuela hurries over to the edge of the pool, bending slightly to tug Ashe and the boy closer to her. “Come on, climb up,” she urges, frowning down at the still-unconscious student. “Oh, how did this happen? Ashe, come on now, get out of the water. You’ll both catch colds.”

“Is he okay? He’s not—” _breathing,_ Ashe can’t say, because the word rings with the sort of finality he doesn’t believe in. How had this student fallen in at all? Had the bullies pushed him? Or had his head been held down in the water long enough for…

Professor Manuela helps them both up onto solid ground again, then moves the student to lie flat on his back on the floor, tilting his chin upward. Ashe watches, a little numbly, as she goes through what look like well-practiced motions—she presses down on his chest the way Ashe’s seen people do in movies sometimes, and only when the boy’s eyes fly open and he coughs and hacks out mouthfuls of water does Ashe let go of the breath he was holding in.

“Wh—What—” His eyes are wide and wild, and when he whirls around to face Ashe, he looks like a cornered animal finding itself caught in a trap. “The—Where are the—”

“You’re safe now,” Professor Manuela says, her voice softening as she lays a hand on his arm. He stills, looking up at her but saying nothing. “We got to you just in time. Come on, let’s get you to the infirmary—let me just see if you need anything else. Can you walk?”

He nods, slowly, as if he still doesn’t quite understand what’s happening—his gaze drifts back to Ashe again, but Ashe can’t tell what he’s thinking based on those eyes alone. Professor Manuela guides the boy with a hand on his shoulder, but when she looks back at Ashe, she smiles wearily. “You did well, Ashe. It’s late, you should—”

“I’ll go with you,” he interrupts. Then, at Professor Manuela’s somewhat-surprised look, “Let me go with you?”

After an unsure glance down at the student, who stares fixedly at the floor, Professor Manuela sighs. “Oh, fine, but calm down and don’t look so worried. You’ll get wrinkles, and you’re only ten.”

At the infirmary, Professor Manuela leads the boy over to one of the beds and asks him some questions about how he’s feeling—when he answers, mostly with only one or two words and completely avoiding the question about why the bullies had tried to drown him at all, she nods and says he’s free to stay here and rest until he wants to go home. Then she returns to the front desk, leaving Ashe and the boy alone in the backroom.

“Um… what’s your name?” Ashe asks, drying his hair off with a towel Professor Manuela lent him. He had his gym clothes to change into, but the boy apparently doesn’t even have a schoolbag ( _anymore,_ he’d said), so he settled for drawing the blanket up to his chin.

The boy doesn’t look at him, and it takes a while before he responds, as if he’s thinking about his answer. Which is weird, since it seems like a pretty easy question. “Yuri.”

“Yuri.” It’s a pretty name. It doesn’t sound like a common one, certainly. “I’m Ashe. So, uh… are you okay now?”

“Mm.”

It’s barely an answer, but Ashe will take it. “I-I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything myself,” Ashe stammers. “If I’d tried to fight those boys off, I wouldn’t have been any help.”

“Mm.”

Ashe frowns. “Why… did they do that?”

It’s a question Professor Manuela had tried to wheedle the answer out of three times earlier, and a question Yuri had ignored all three times as well, but for some reason Ashe asks it anyway. For a long while, there’s no answer—then Yuri finally breaks his gaze from the ceiling to look at Ashe, for the first time since the one-sided conversation. “Do they need a reason?”

“Oh.” Ashe worries on his lower lip. “I guess not.” He’s never _understood_ bullying. The teachers are always talking about how they should be kind and understanding and think about what the bully might feel, which kind of feels like a joke, because Ashe is pretty sure what the _victim_ might feel is a little more important in these situations. How could it get serious enough that they’d _drown_ someone? He once read that it only took 60 seconds for an adult to drown, and 20 seconds for a kid their age. And how long had Yuri been in the water for?

“Don’t know,” Yuri mumbles, and only now does Ashe realize he had said all of that aloud. He blinks, and Yuri is giving him another look from the bed, having drawn the blankets further up until it covers his mouth now. “But I think you’re right.”

“Huh?”

“The victim’s more important,” Yuri repeats, and the corners of his eyes crinkle up in a telltale sign of a hidden smile.

As it turns out, Yuri spends lunch break alone at the rooftop, which explains why Ashe has never seen him around until he actively searches the guy out. It takes him a while, and a lot of sneaking around to bypass the watchful eyes of teachers in parts of the school he shouldn’t be in, but eventually he makes his way up to the rooftop.

Sunlight sparkles off lavender hair. Yuri sits cross-legged, leaning back against the railing, gaze angled up towards the clouds.

“Yuri!”

Yuri jerks in surprise; Ashe hurries over, nearly dropping his lunch tray on the floor between them. “So this is where you were! I spent forever looking for you.”

“What are you doing here?”

That hadn’t been the welcoming greeting Ashe had been expecting. “Um… eating with you?”

“Why?” Yuri scowls.

“Because we’re friends?” Ashe tries. They are, aren’t they? As far as Ashe is concerned, he’d rescued Yuri from the swimming pool in a heroic act of… heroism, and now they’re friends. Is it that difficult to understand? Or does Yuri not consider that friendly enough for him?

Yuri crosses his arms. It takes Ashe a second to realize he doesn’t have a lunch tray with him, or anything nearby that might hint at him having eaten anything at all. “No, we’re not.”

“Then we will be,” Ashe says; then, before Yuri can argue, “Haven’t you eaten? Here. Sweet buns.” He pushes his tray under Yuri’s nose until Yuri has no choice but to hesitantly take one of the sweet buns off the plate. “You should eat. You’re really thin. I bet that’s why the bullies went after you.”

“Because I’m thin?” Yuri mutters, looking amused.

“Because you look easy to push around.” Ashe frowns. He has a feeling he’s going to be doing that a lot with Yuri. “If we’re friends, I’ll make sure to protect you if anyone goes after you again. But no one should be going after you in the first place!”

Yuri rolls his eyes. “You’re not even stronger than me or anything. Actually, I think you’re _weaker._ ”

“Yeah, probably,” Ashe agrees, to Yuri’s evident surprise. “But the teachers like me.”

“That…” Yuri trails off, takes a bite of the sweet bun, and chews it slowly before eventually responding. “You’ve got a point.”

Ashe never really finds out much about Yuri. He knows little things, that Yuri likes sweets, that Yuri thinks makeup is pretty but pretends it isn’t, that Yuri is allergic to dogs and cats which is really disappointing because this means he’ll never be able to visit Ashe’s house, that Yuri tenses up whenever they pass by the bullies in the hallway. But Ashe never really finds out much else, like where Yuri lives or if he has siblings or what his mom’s job is. He doesn’t even know his last name. _Yuri_ itself might just be a nickname.

But they’re friends, even if Yuri tries to say they aren’t, and that’s enough for Ashe. During breaktime and after classes, he brings Yuri to all his favorite spots—the garden, definitely, but also the little areas in the school they both know they aren’t allowed in. Yuri isn’t much for stories, but he listens to Ashe whenever Ashe thinks up a new quest for the two of them to undertake, and Yuri always plays along and helps Ashe slay the mighty dragon hiding behind some old cardboard boxes in the storage rooms they infiltrate. Ashe takes to cooking even more often, finding ways to reach the top shelves without Lonato’s or Christophe’s help, and makes Yuri lunch whenever he can.

And in return, Yuri brings him gifts—books, specifically, that Ashe can’t find in the library and are always too expensive to buy in the bookshops, even when Lonato says they can more than afford it. “I just find them,” Yuri explains, every time Ashe asks where he gets these. “It’s no big deal. I don’t need them, but I thought you would.”

“Oh.” There are unspoken words buried in those sentences, words Ashe thinks he’s only too familiar with. “You shouldn’t have, Yuri.” _Why didn’t you get more for yourself?_

Yuri always just shrugs. On some days, he says, “I wanted to.” On most, he simply waits for Ashe to read the book aloud to him.

Ashe supposes another thing about Yuri he finds out about is that he isn’t much for words, especially when they’re around other people—he speaks mostly through nodding or shaking his head, or just giving Ashe a variety of looks that Ashe learns to differentiate. Maybe Yuri’s only talkative around friends, Ashe theorizes, but then Ashe never sees him with anyone else, so it’s not like either of them would know. It’s a little frustrating, because Yuri has a nice voice, and Ashe thinks he would sound nice singing.

Still, that just means every word and sentence Ashe gets out of Yuri brings a smile to his face, even if it’s usually just a dry remark.

When the next school year starts, on some unbelievably hot day in the first week of August, Ashe is asked to clean up the folders and files in the teacher’s table—only the first day, and already it’s a mess, because apparently they hadn’t bothered to move everything from one classroom to the next, whatever. But it’s okay, because aside from always having extra time after school, Ashe knows this just makes the teachers like him more.

It had been pretty lonely without Yuri around for the first day, though. But he tries not to think about that—sometimes Yuri didn’t come to class for days, then popped back in after nearly a week of absences without even a hint of an explanation. Ashe had learned to stop expecting one.

He rifles around in the desk drawers, separating useful files from pointless ones, thinking vaguely about the extra, uneaten packed lunch in his bag—then Ashe blinks, and looks down at a loose sheet of paper dated back to last school year. A class list, he realizes, filled up by the students themselves. Ashe remembers their homeroom teacher asking them to answer it with their nickname and add in information, like their favorite food and their birthday or something.

Ashe probably shouldn’t, but he skims through the names curiously anyway—this isn’t his class, and he doesn’t recognize many names. But at the very end of the list, written in small, unassuming letters: _Yuri._ Beside that, _Birthday:_ _August 12._

“Ashe?” Their new homeroom teacher peers around the doorway; Ashe immediately shoves the paper back into the dusty plastic envelope he had found it in. “Are you all done there? You can go home once you’re finished.”

“Oh—yeah, almost done…”

After the teacher leaves, Ashe peeks back down at the paper. August 12… that’s in just a little under a week. Surely Yuri will be in school for his birthday, won’t he? Besides, it’d be trouble if Yuri _doesn’t_ go to school so early into the academic year.

More importantly, though, Ashe needs to learn how to bake a cake. Right now.

Yuri doesn’t come to school for the next four days.

Which is fine. Totally fine. Ashe tells himself this for the rest of the week as he pores over recipe books in Lonato’s library and goes through batch after batch of not-sweet-enough cakes (that his siblings eat up) until, finally, he gets himself just the right flavor that he’s _sure_ Yuri would like. If only Yuri had a phone or a Facebook or literally anything Ashe could use to contact him with, Ashe just knows he could somehow coerce Yuri to go to school through a picture of the cake alone.

But it’s fine, because Yuri will go to school on his birthday. And even if it weren’t his birthday, he _has_ to go to school—any more absences and the teachers will call his mom or issue some kind of punishment. Yuri had never really stayed home like this for so long, so Ashe is sure he’ll show up soon.

He does not.

Yuri isn’t in his classroom when Ashe peeks in, as he’s been doing for the past four days. Yuri isn’t at the rooftop, watching the clouds pass by overhead. Yuri isn’t at the gardens, staring idly at the flowers swaying in the breeze. Yuri isn’t in the library, picking out books with nice covers and silently handing them to Ashe. Yuri isn’t in any of the storage rooms, sitting atop a box and swinging his feet just shy of touching the floor.

Ashe’s arms are getting tired of carrying the heavy cake around the entire school. And he has a feeling it isn’t going to taste very well the longer it’s out in the August heat. So where is Yuri? It’s his birthday, so maybe he’s celebrating at… at home, or something, and yet why hasn’t he come to school for days? Why hasn’t he come to school since the start of the year? Why doesn’t he ever tell Ashe anything?

At the next corner he turns, Ashe lifts his gaze up to blink at the sign in front of a door—the infirmary. He rushes in, still doing his best not to jostle the cake around, and Professor Manuela looks up from where she’s sitting by the desk. “Professor?” Ashe manages, somehow managing to keep his voice from breaking. “Do you know where Yuri is?”

Professor Manuela frowns. “Sorry, dear. Who?”

 _Yuri itself might just be a nickname…_ “P… Purple,” Ashe stammers out. He’d say it’s all he can come up with, but the rest of the words his mind conjures— _pretty, long lashes, too quiet, likes sweets_ —probably won’t help. “He has purple hair, and eyes, and… and, it was that time, at the pool…”

“Oh, _him,_ ” Professor Manuela says, murmuring something that sounds like a name under her breath, too soft and fast for Ashe to hear. “He didn’t tell you? He transferred.”

Ashe freezes in place.

“Who knows where, though? He didn’t write anything for which school he was going to. It’s possible he dropped out entirely.” Professor Manuela’s expression softens, and she opens her mouth to say more, but by then Ashe can’t hear anything over the softest of sounds—the hum of the air conditioning, the creak of the door as he pushes it open, the shrill buzzing of cicadas in the nearby garden.

He doesn’t know how long it takes him to walk to the soccer field, but when he finally catches Christophe’s eye from where he’s standing with the rest of his teammates, Ashe’s legs are aching. “What’s wrong?” Christophe asks. “Your friend’s still not at school?”

“He didn’t tell me…”

Christophe crouches down, ignoring the other soccer club members calling him out to play, and holds his hands out. “I’ll carry that. You wanna go home early today?”

Ashe clutches the cake box tighter. “N-No. It’s okay. You go.” And then, before Christophe can convince him any further, he makes a break towards the bleachers and sits himself down on the seat as far away from the field as possible, gripping onto the box like it’s the last thing he trusts himself not to lose.

Why didn’t Yuri tell him? Had he been planning to leave when they all went home for summer vacation? Had he been planning to leave, and hadn’t told Ashe? The last time Ashe had seen him, they’d been reading in the garden together, because the last day of school meant the gardener went a little lighter on them and let them stay there longer than they were allowed. But the book was too long, and Ashe hadn’t been able to finish reading it aloud—he still stumbled over some of the longer words that were harder to pronounce.

“It’s okay,” Ashe remembers saying, when he’d closed the book and stood up from the rock he’d been sitting on. “I’ll finish it for you when we get back to school.”

He hadn’t seen how Yuri had looked. Had Yuri known, then, that there would be no finishing that book that has been burning a hole through Ashe’s bag for days? Ashe doesn’t want to let this go so easily. Surely Yuri remembers. Surely Yuri wants him to finish the book, too. Surely…

Ashe doesn’t realize he’s crying until the tears hit the box on his lap. Inside, the battered cake has already begun to melt, icing drooping sadly down its sides.

2

“Hey, Ashe!”

Ashe turns a page of the book, glancing up just long enough to catch the librarian giving Caspar a weary glare. “Come on, keep your voice down,” he admonishes, though he knows that’s hardly going to change anything. “What is it?”

Caspar grins, turning around to look at someone behind him. “Remember I told you I wanted you to meet someone? This is Lin!”

“Linhardt,” a soft, sleepy voice mumbles. “Really, at least get the rest of my name out.”

In retrospect, Ashe thinks looking up from his book at that time was the biggest mistake of his high school life.

Linhardt is Caspar’s best friend. Apparently he was previously homeschooled by his doctor parents, which is why he has an unnecessarily extensive knowledge of medicine, but they had finally decided to enroll him into the same high school Caspar (and Ashe) study in.

And he is _pretty._

Ashe’s only experience with romance is in books, as should be expected. Most of the novels he reads have romance subplots, even though they’re honestly overused and so cliché that Ashe can predict all the tropes the moment the hero and the damsel in distress meet. And that experience really isn’t the sort of experience he needs for a crisis like _this._

 _This_ being sitting across Linhardt at the lunch table, with Caspar scarfing down his lunch and generally being very unhelpful next to him. Normally, Ashe _talks—_ he tries to get Caspar to study for their next test with him, or he narrates some… interesting events that happened throughout the day (because with Claude as a classmate, everyday is interesting), or _anything._ Caspar usually listens, because he tends to be too busy eating to respond coherently.

Now, though, all Ashe can really do is stare blankly at his lunch and pray to whatever gods are listening to have mercy and take him now.

Linhardt, at least, doesn’t seem to think the silence is at all awkward—he’s reading something under the desk, some thick book that isn’t from the library, nor is it one of their textbooks. But is Ashe really expected to just _sit here,_ in _complete silence,_ for, what, 40 minutes? He’s on the verge of pulling a page from Caspar’s book and eating as loud as humanly possible just so he has something to do that isn’t zone out, but just watching Linhardt’s long fingers turning the pages of the book is enough to make Ashe lose his appetite. In a good way. In a bad way? He has no idea.

“What is it?” Linhardt suddenly asks, in that sleep-soft voice of his, and Ashe guiltily looks up from where he had been staring under the table. “You look like you have something to say.”

“Huh? I mean, oh, yeah, uh…” In Ashe’s head, one brain cell repeatedly beats the other brain cell up and shakes it by the shoulders until a singular coherent thought floats into existence. “W-What book are you reading? It looks… interesting.” That statement is _interesting_ in itself, considering the only thing Ashe can see from here are indistinguishable, upside-down letters on the pages.

Linhardt brightens. Ashe’s heart feels ready to bounce right out of his chest and _splat_ wetly on the cafeteria tiles. “It’s the third book of this trilogy. Have you heard of it?” He lifts the book up to show Ashe the cover, and Ashe feels his eyes widen at the familiar author and cover design. “It isn’t as good as the first two, and some parts feel shoehorned, but it’s at least developing the relationship between these two characters…”

“The swordsman and the mage, right?” Ashe blurts out—now that he’s on familiar territory, this whole talking thing is suddenly much easier to do. “Are they really talking more in that one? I’m only caught up with the second book, and I hated that the author let them have, what, two scenes together and nothing else when it feels like they have amazing chemistry!”

“If you only have the second book, you can borrow this when I’m done reading,” Linhardt offers, so casually that Ashe suddenly remembers who he’s talking to. “As long as you promise not to get food all over it like Caspar, anyway.”

“Hey!” Caspar swallows a mouthful of meatball and says, “That was a one-time thing! And you _wanted_ to get rid of that textbook so your dad wouldn’t make you study it anymore, so really, I was doing you a favor, Lin!”

“Right,” Linhardt says, the corner of his lip curling up in an amused little smirk. Predictably enough, it’s suddenly all Ashe can focus on, for the next 40 minutes and for the next four days.

Ashe had never really believed books about high school when they said being 16 or 17 or whatever appropriate high-school age was hard, but at _15,_ he’s starting to wonder if those books had made points after all. He searches up articles online, making sure to clear his history before Christophe gets on the computer, but none of them are any real help, because mostly he needs to know what to do _now_ that he does, in fact, like boys, and maybe he’s not using the right keywords or something, but he really isn’t looking for… He doesn’t even want to think about some of the results that came up.

Not for the first time, he wishes Yuri were here—or that he at least had some way of talking to Yuri, wherever he is. Yuri always seemed to know what to do when they ran into problems. But it’s been so long, sometimes Ashe wonders if Yuri had ever really existed at all.

As promised, Linhardt lends Ashe the book, and Ashe devours it like he needs it to live. As it turns out, Linhardt is the sort of person who writes in his books, a habit he gained after having to keep himself awake and entertained while reading medical textbooks, so during class Ashe lets himself trace the tiny comments scrawled in the margins— _this fight scene is too drawn out, this conversation is useless, I hate this character I hope he dies at the end._ Ashe imagines hearing all these in Linhardt’s voice, perpetually bored and monotonous, and smiles to himself when the teacher isn’t looking.

It occurs to him that it’s probably the same sort of smile his classmates get when they’re texting their crush, and the thought makes Ashe want to crawl into a hole and hibernate for as long as it takes to get Linhardt out of his life.

But like all things, Ashe very slowly begins to get used to it. They have lunch together, and Ashe actually starts speaking a little normally. They watch Caspar’s soccer practices together, and it turns out they both know more about the sport than they care to. They go to the library together and have very serious discussions over their opinions on characters of different books. And sometimes, during archery club, Ashe sees Linhardt and Caspar sitting at the side, Caspar grinning every time he catches his eye and Linhardt looking up from his book every so often to nod at him.

Ashe makes sure to spend extra time nocking his arrow and poises his arms _just so,_ but by then Linhardt’s always back to reading. Which, okay. Ashe probably should have expected that. It’s not like there’s much to see on his arms anyway. But that doesn’t stop him from trying every time he gets the chance.

Somewhat unfortunately, it means that under the influence of familiarity and friendship, the nervousness and stuttering begin to morph into what Ashe realizes is _clinginess._ He can’t stop himself from touching Linhardt’s elbow for no real reason while they’re talking, or sitting a little closer than necessary if they’re on a bench or a couch. Is it a bad thing? It’s probably a bad thing, because Ashe would never touch someone if they didn’t want it, but then Linhardt never says anything or moves away or looks annoyed. He always just… looks like himself, which is to say sleepy and bored.

“Caspar,” Ashe says, one day, when Linhardt had decided to stay home during their PE class, “I’ve got a question.”

“Is it _that_ important?” Caspar whines, leaning forward. They’re doing a practice game of baseball today, and Ashe had reluctantly agreed to a bet that Leonie’s team would win against Lorenz’s. “Okay, quick, while they’re taking a timeout! What is it?”

Ashe frowns. He never has to worry about Caspar judging or thinking badly of him, mostly because Caspar does very questionable things, like leaping out of the school building from the third floor, that Ashe knows he can’t do without him. But… “Do you ever… Um, have you ever had a crush?”

Caspar frowns. “No? Gross?”

Of course. “Let’s say you have one right now,” Ashe decides.

“I don’t, though—”

“ _Let’s say you do,_ ” Ashe insists. When Caspar huffs and crosses his arms, but still looks like he’s at least listening, Ashe continues. “Would you… you know, theoretically… have a crush on a… guy?”

For a moment, Caspar looks perfectly blank, his expression reminiscent of the face he often wears whenever exam season rolls around. Then he says, “Ohhh,” like he’s comprehending Ashe’s question five seconds later, and then another moment of silence. Just as the tension is about to eat away at Ashe’s skull, Caspar says, “So, you too!”

“Me—” Ashe sputters. “What do you mean, me _too?_ ”

Caspar just grins and gives him a thumbs-up. “I get it! You should ask Lin for help!”

“ _Linhardt?_ ”

“Yeah! He’d know more about this than me. Shame he’s not here right now.” Caspar looks around the gym like Linhardt’s about to just stroll in the front doors. Which Ashe remembers Linhardt actually has done, several times, just a few minutes before PE would have ended.

Ashe worries on his lower lip. “I don’t want to talk to _Linhardt_ about this.” He tries putting as much emphasis on Linhardt’s name as possible, if only to get the point across to Caspar without actually needing to say the truth aloud.

As expected, Caspar just frowns again. “Aren’t you guys friends?”

This is hopeless. “Never mind,” Ashe mumbles. “Uh, sure, I’ll talk to him about it or something…”

He does not talk to Linhardt about it. What exactly would he gain from that aside from making his stupid crush even _more_ obvious to the other guy? Ashe is content with just this, with just lending each other books and listening to Linhardt drone on about medicine and reading together in the library—like now, a few days after that pointless conversation.

It’s quieter than usual today, with less people around, so Ashe has to lower his voice a little too when he waxes poetic about the cleric in the latest fantasy series they’ve grown invested in. “It’s so cool that he knows so much about this tiny niche topic that everyone just sort of glosses over and takes for granted…”

Ashe looks up when Linhardt doesn’t reply right away, and realizes he’s already nodding off. “Oh, Linhardt… um, do you want to go home, or…”

“Mm. No, I’m fine, I’m awake…” Linhardt yawns, and his eyes flutter open, the deep ocean-blue color standing out against his pale skin. “I agree. And this mercenary character is the only one who ever listens to them when they’re rambling. I find it sweet.”

 _Sweet…_ Ashe swallows, looking down at his notebook. They’d been studying together at first, but had quickly given that up in favor of a more interesting conversation. There are eyes doodled in the margins of his notebook, big and blue, and Ashe hastily flips to a blank page before Linhardt can notice. “U-Um, yeah,” he murmurs, only capable of looking at a spot on Linhardt’s cheek and no further. “Yeah, it’s nice, right? When someone listens to you.”

“It also means the cleric gets to explain a lot about the Crests in the universe,” Linhardt says, evidently completely missing the atmosphere Ashe had been aiming for, “which means we get more lore than we know what to do with. So it doubles as a bit of worldbuilding, too. And there’s all the talk about their weapons, which normally I wouldn’t find very interesting, but when they explain the mechanics behind their Caduceus Staff—”

Ashe rests his chin on the edge of his palm, trying to keep himself from smiling dopily, but Linhardt’s interrupted fairly early on in his tangent by someone stopping next to their table. “Caduceus Staff?” a girl repeats, tilting her head—Annette, Ashe remembers. His classmate. They don’t really talk much, but he knows she’s at the top of their class in science. “Are you reading those books too?”

Linhardt blinks. Every time he gets cut off when he’s talking, it always seems like he needs a second or two to process the situation and respond accordingly. “Oh, yes. Hello.”

Annette beams. “Hi! I’m Annette! Oh, Ashe,” she chirps, turning to face him, “I didn’t know you liked this sort of stuff! So you these are the books you read under the table during class all the time, huh?”

Ashe feels his cheeks heat up. Had she caught him smiling like an idiot at the books sometimes? He hopes to the gods she hasn’t. “Haha, uh, yeah… I didn’t know you did, either, Annette… B-By the way, this is Linhardt,” he says, just to direct the attention away from himself. “He, uh, he’s really into this sort of stuff, too! It’s not just me!”

The way he worded that makes it sound like the books are something taboo, but Ashe tries not to think too hard about it. Finding out you like boys? No big deal. Talking to girls? Still a complete mystery, as far as he’s concerned.

Linhardt nods, giving Ashe an odd look. “Nice to meet you.”

“Who’s your favorite character?” Annette plops herself down on the seat beside Ashe, their elbows knocking together, and Ashe almost falls off the chair entirely. “I really like the mage! She’s super cool, _and_ she can use a warhammer!”

She’s looking at Ashe when she speaks, and Ashe’s brain short-circuits. He looks to Linhardt for help, then realizes he shouldn’t have expected Linhardt to help him with literally anything involving human interaction, because Linhardt just stares blankly back at him, so Ashe goes with the first thing he thinks of. “Um, I like the, uh—the cleric! Yeah, I like the cleric best!”

From the corner of his eye, Ashe can see Linhardt shaking his head, as if suffering from secondhand embarrassment. It surely can’t be worse than _firsthand_ embarrassment.

Thankfully, Annette takes it in stride and grins widely. “Ooh! He’s quiet and lazy and saves his energy for only the more important stuff, so it makes you think he’s super smart but trying to hide it! The cleric does sorta look like your type, Ashe!”

“Hahahaha,” Ashe laughs, perhaps a bit hysterically. He sneaks a glance at Linhardt, who suddenly looks very interested. “Yeah… uh… what other books do you read, Annette?”

When Annette has to leave—apparently she had dropped by the library for an errand she had completely forgotten about for half an hour—Ashe slumps against the backrest of his chair, exhaling deeply and feeling like he had, for some reason, run the longest marathon of his life. “That looked exhausting,” Linhardt observes, looking amused. He hadn’t said much throughout the conversation aside from a few comments here and there. Good for _him._

“She’s nice,” Ashe says. It’s true, anyway. It’s just…

Linhardt tilts his head, looking thoughtful. “Do you like her?”

Ashe blinks. “What? Uh, well, she’s a good person. She helps me out sometimes during science cla—”

“No, I mean,” Linhardt sighs, flapping his hand, “do you _have a crush_ on her or something?”

“ _Huh?_ ”

“You know, you were all… stuttery and blushy and what-have-you.” Linhardt snickers. It’s not the first time Ashe has heard him laugh like that, in a smug, vaguely-evil sort of way, but Ashe reddens at the sound all the same. So what if it’s kind of cute? “You don’t even _like_ the cleric. Isn’t your favorite the thief?”

Geh. Ashe had been hoping Linhardt had forgotten about that. In Ashe’s opinion, there are two types of favorite characters—a character you see yourself in, and a character you _like-_ like. It should be obvious which category the cleric fits into. “T-That’s not it…”

“So, what? Were you just shy?” Linhardt shakes his head. “Boring… You know, some of my classmates are already getting into relationships. Or at least getting crushes.”

Ashe stiffens. Linhardt sounds one word away from asking Ashe about his nonexistent love life, and Ashe is not ready for that conversation. “What about you? Do you like anyone, Linhardt?” It’s hard to imagine someone as generally apathetic as Linhardt liking someone, but Ashe is willing to do anything to get out of this situation.

“No. Gross.”

Of course. Like Caspar, like Linhardt. Then Linhardt waves a hand in the air again, and Ashe unfortunately remembers his current predicament. “So what about _you?_ ”

“Uh… me…?”

“Yes, you. Do _you_ have a crush? If not on Annette, anyway.”

 _Ugh._ Of course Ashe does. By this point, he’s not sure if Linhardt knows and is just doing this to tease Ashe about it or something, but that sounds like _too_ mean, even for Linhardt. But… if Linhardt _doesn’t_ know, then what better way to let him know than now? This stupid crush has been wreaking havoc on Ashe for two, maybe three months by now, and he’s honestly starting to worry it’s just going to get worse the longer he lets it grow.

He swallows. Now or never. “Um… I… I do, actually.”

Linhardt leans forward, eyes sparkling in interest. “Go on,” he urges. It’s kind of cute, how unassuming he acts when he actually adores gossip. Then again, Ashe finds a lot of things about Linhardt cute when they really aren’t, or at least really shouldn’t be.

“You know…” Ashe forces himself to maintain eye contact, if only because it’s polite. “I-I wasn’t lying. The cleric really is my favorite character.”

Linhardt’s brow furrows, but he says nothing.

“He, uh… He acts really aloof, but he actually cares a lot for his close friends,” Ashe babbles. “He’s really knowledgeable and intelligent, but he doesn’t show it off, because he only really cares about the things that interest him most… and I-I like that! I admire him for it!” Is he still making sense? If he stops now, though, Ashe is sure he’ll never be able to say anything like this again, and so he pushes through despite his last two brain cells desperately screaming for him to stop. “And! I really like his long hair! I think he looks very p-pretty!”

 _Okay, that’s enough,_ his mind says, like they’re tugging on the reins keeping his mouth shut. _You’ve gone above and beyond your embarrassment limit for the day._

Across the table, Linhardt sits in perfect silence, staring at him like he’s learned a particularly interesting fact, but not interesting enough to warrant a reaction out of him. So, the same expression he gets whenever a classmate he dislikes regales him with a strange-but-useless story. “I… see,” Linhardt eventually says.

Ashe buries his face in his hands. “Can you forget everything I just said, please.”

“You like me.”

“Yeah.” Ashe peeks out from between his fingers, but Linhardt’s expression hasn’t changed. “I… I like you! So… there. Now you know.”

“Hmm.” And then, without a shred of emotion, “That’s nice. Thanks, I guess.”

“Wh… Huh?”

“Sorry I don’t feel the same,” Linhardt says, not sounding very sorry at all, “but you’re not the first one to tell me this.” Ashe hears the unspoken “get in line” loud and clear. “I never knew people got crushes so easily. I’ve been cornered under staircases and asked to go to the rooftop five times now…”

When Ashe is too shocked to form words, mostly because he’s trying to imagine other students their year confessing to _Linhardt,_ Linhardt frowns and starts looking genuinely concerned, which Ashe hadn’t thought possible until now. “Is there… anything else you want me to say?”

“W-Wait! Just like that?” Ashe squeaks. He doesn’t mean to, his voice just ends up going a pitch higher than it should. “Are you… Don’t you hate me or anything? For liking you?”

“No?” Linhardt looks extremely confused. “Why would I hate you for liking me? That seems very contradictory.”

Of course Linhardt would say something like _contradictory_ in casual conversation. “How… How did the others confess to you?”

Now Linhardt just looks put out. “Terribly. One girl simply would not stop bothering me until I learned how to tune her out, and then she had the gall to lure me beneath the staircase with some cake just so she could tell me about her love for me. Which is strange, because we’ve barely talked, and she’s only known me for about a month.”

“Cake?” Ashe’s voice definitely cracks this time. He’s not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Linhardt nods. “Another boy wrote me a love poem and left it in my shoe locker, and invited me up to the rooftop to meet him. I only went because he promised a gift in the post-script.”

 _Love poems can have post-scripts?_ “And… what was it?”

“Socks.”

Ashe laughs—the image of Linhardt being gifted a _pair of socks,_ of all things, as part of a _love confession,_ is enough to make him just a bit more hysterical than he had already been. “What—What kind?”

Linhardt looks slightly worried for him. “Well… they were soft. I tried them on at home—after washing them, of course—and they were fairly warm. So not bad, all in all. But the poem really was too awful for me to stomach, so I had to turn him down as well.”

Ashe laughs again, and this time he can’t stop—he has to push his chair away from the table to give himself space to keel over and clutch his stomach. Knowing the librarian is probably glaring at him from behind is just making him laugh harder, and when he looks up to meet Linhardt’s bewildered gaze, he almost starts crying entirely. “Sorry,” he gasps out, “I just—wasn’t expecting this. Any of this.”

“Me neither,” Linhardt replies evenly. “Shouldn’t you be a little, er… sadder?”

Ashe blinks. “Oh. Yeah, probably. But…” Mostly it feels like a weight’s been lifted off both his shoulders and chest, and for the first time in a while, breathing feels a little easier than it has been for the past few months. “I don’t know. I’m just glad.”

“Glad…?”

“That we’re still friends.” Ashe smiles.

Linhardt seems as unfazed as ever. “Oh, of course. That’s very like you.” He turns a page of his book, though he hadn’t been reading it, so Ashe wonders if he’d just needed something to do with his hands. _Cute,_ he thinks, before waving the thought away—no more of those. “Want to go get sweet buns?”

Ashe grins. “I’ll pay this time.”

On one perfectly normal morning, a few days after the worst love confession of all time, Annette barrels into the classroom clutching a crumpled letter in her hand. “Ashe!” she shouts, waving the paper around and generally attracting the attention of every student in the room. “Is—Is this from you!?”

Ashe doesn’t even have time to process the question, much less answer it, before Annette is talking again, loud enough that Ashe is fairly sure the classroom next door can hear her. “I’m so sorry! You’re a really nice guy, Ashe, and I think you _are_ cute, in a scruffy, puppy-dog kind of way, but I just don’t like you that way! I’m sorry to turn you down like this, really!”

The room goes quiet after her outburst. Behind him, Ashe can hear Leonie desperately trying to hold back her laughter. And beside him, Raphael not-so-subtly whispers, “Damn, bro, that sucks.”

“Uh, Annette,” Ashe starts, feeling ready to melt under the intense stares of nearly everyone in the room, “I didn’t—”

“You _idiot!_ ” someone shouts, followed by the screech of chair legs against the floor. From her seat at the back, Lysithea stomps up and grabs the paper out of Annette’s hand—a cutesy little heart sticker flutters sadly to the ground. “This is from _me!_ How could you not recognize my handwriting!?”

Annette gapes. “ _What?_ ”

Lysithea fishes a sticker sheet out of her pocket. It’s absolutely full of the same cutesy heart stickers. It’s also absolutely not what resident heavy metal rock band listener Lysithea is into, at all. “You saw these in the convenience store and said they were cute so I bought them and _I was supposed to give these to you somewhere private!_ Idiot! You complete idiot!” And then she stomps off, all 4 feet and 10 inches of her radiating sulkiness.

“Wait! Lysi!” Annette yelps, hurrying out the door. “I didn’t—hey, hold on!”

“Shut up! Go away!”

“Stop running! You’re gonna fall!” Annette kicks the door shut behind her, and the only sound for a good few seconds is the rapid thudding of their footfalls outside the corridors.

Caspar nudges Ashe with his elbow. “Looks like you got rejected, dude.”

“I-I wasn’t—”

“Rejected before you even got to ask,” Caspar muses, shaking his head like a wise sage. “That’s a new level of sad, man.”

Rejected twice within the same week, more like, Ashe thinks—but he laughs a little anyway, because he already knows he and Caspar are going to tell Linhardt about this over lunch later.

3

Dimitri, Ashe thinks, is just _too_ nice.

Dedue had been the one to introduce them, mostly because Dimitri went where Dedue did, and Ashe and Dedue partnered up often in class. Whenever their last lecture of the day was finished, Dimitri always showed up at the classroom door, waiting for Dedue. Ashe found it sweet, but he’d never really paid much attention to the other guy until he had to visit Dedue’s dorm to drop something off.

As expected of Ashe’s luck, Dimitri had been the one to answer the door. “Oh,” he’d said, staring somewhere around Ashe’s neck instead of at his face, “good morning.”

It was mid-afternoon, but Ashe decided against correcting him. “Hi there.” For some reason, instead of just asking for Dedue, he’d gone with, “You’re Dimitri, right? Dedue’s best friend?” Maybe it was just the instinctual need to fill up the silence somehow, as if knowing it was one way to deal with a person who didn’t speak much.

“Ah, um, I don’t know about best friend, but we _are_ close,” Dimitri allowed. He still wasn’t looking at Ashe. “You can, ah… You should come in and wait for him. If you like, of course.”

He talks like a posh socialite, Ashe noted. Not someone he thought Dedue would get along with, but Dimitri seemed like an okay person so far. “Sure, thanks.”

Everything on Dimitri’s side of the room—or what Ashe presumed was his side—screamed luxury: an elegant desk lamp, an ornate dresser drawer, shoeboxes from prominent brands stacked on top of one another. A porcelain tea set was sitting delicately atop a study desk filled with yet more expensive-looking knickknacks, including what looked like a ceremonial dagger. There was a huge fur coat hung up on a rack by the wall, the same coat Ashe often saw Dimitri wear whenever he stopped by their class.

“Wow,” Ashe couldn’t help but murmur. Dedue’s side of the dorm was much the same as Ashe’s own, after all—neat, simple, a potted plant or two—and it just exacerbated the quiet splendor of Dimitri’s. “Your room’s… really nice!” _You’re stinking rich!_

Finally, Dimitri looked up from his messy curtain of bangs—at 19 years old, he had apparently been in the middle of transitioning from “spaghetti head” to “rat’s nest,” at least according to Sylvain—and then blinked, eyes wide, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. His eyes were ice blue, the sort of shade you’d see in the waters of the tundra. “Oh,” Dimitri breathed, very quietly.

Out of lack of things to do in response, Ashe politely smiled back. “Um. Yes?”

“You look really nice,” Dimitri suddenly said.

“Haha,” Ashe, dressed in a ratty old sweater and legitimately-ripped jeans, blandly replied. Then, when it became obvious Dimitri hadn’t been joking and was _still_ staring at him like a deer in the headlights, “What?”

He was saved from having to continue the conversation when Dedue walked in, a plastic bag in one hand and packed lunch in the other. “Dimitri, I brought—”

Dedue paused, standing at the doorway, as he stared at Dimitri staring at Ashe.

“H-Hey, Dedue!” Ashe stammered, hurrying over to his side. “You left your folder in my room yesterday, so I thought I’d come give it back—haha—okay, well, gotta go!” He turned around and gave Dimitri a halfhearted wave out of courtesy, though Dimitri didn’t look like anything was registering in his head at the moment. Then, without waiting for anyone to reply, Ashe scurried out of the room and only until he reached the end of the hallway did he let himself breathe again.

Dimitri’s stare was unnerving, and Ashe wasn’t used to it—it had felt like the predator locking its eyes on its next prey. But Ashe assumed he’d overthought, as he was prone to doing, and waved it away—maybe Dimitri was just awkward around strangers. Yeah. That had to be it, right?

At least, that’s what Ashe tells himself when Dedue comes by his dorm, Dimitri trailing shyly along behind, and offers Ashe an elaborate bento box as a gift, “for no reason”—which sounds highly unlikely, because no matter how rich someone is, they wouldn’t give away fresh sushi and excellently-cut crab to a virtual stranger—and it’s what Ashe tells himself when the next time Dimitri visits after class, he offers to carry Ashe’s bookbag for him. Which is sweet, but unnecessary. Really, Dimitri, it’s fine—and, oh, there he takes it.

Ashe has no choice but to blink incredulously at Dimitri’s arm muscles just barely visible under his coat sleeves as he effortlessly lifts Ashe’s bag over his shoulder.

“He likes you,” Dedue tells him, as if this isn’t painfully obvious.

“O-Oh, does he,” Ashe responds, as if he isn’t painfully aware. “Um… he shouldn’t.”

Dedue shrugs. “That’s how he is. It takes a while, but once he gets less shy around you, he should be a little more… talkative. And then perhaps you two can become better friends.”

The idea has appeal. After mulling it over for a second, Ashe quickens his pace a little and falls in step beside Dimitri, who had started walking ahead of them a few minutes ago. “Hey, Dimitri,” Ashe greets, tilting his head up a little to make eye contact. Under the ragged blonde hair, he can just make out Dimitri’s eyes flicking down to look at him. “I see you around a lot, but I don’t really know much about you! So, uh, what’s your major?”

“Oh! Um…” Dimitri looks away again, and Ashe can see the faintest tinge of pink on his cheeks. Is he flustered from a question like that? “Political science. With, ah, psychology as a minor.”

“Cool! What are you studying right now? It’s almost midterms, and I’ve heard poli sci has a lot of readings.”

Dimitri’s blush deepens, and it stands out brightly against his pale hair. “Um, foreign policy, mostly? It is nothing too difficult so far. My father taught me most of what I know—oh, he works in the government, he’s an ambassador…” He looks back at Ashe, and for the first time Ashe sees his smile—it’s small and shy and barely there, but it’s something. “I-I apologize. Did I talk too much…?”

“No, no, you’re fine!” Caspar and Linhardt could say thrice that amount of words in half as much time. A parent working in the government, though… it would explain the posh vibe Dimitri seemed to unconsciously give off. And the money. “Do you want to be like your dad, then?”

Dimitri shrugs awkwardly. “Perhaps not an ambassador as well, but something related to the government does not… sound bad. Psychology is more of a personal interest than anything.”

Ashe chances a glance behind them—Dedue gives him an encouraging nod. “I like psych too,” Ashe says, doing his best to maintain eye contact despite Dimitri’s best efforts to avoid it. “It was my third choice, actually. Which psych are you studying?”

At the dormitories, Dimitri heads into the room first, and Dedue waits a little by the doorway until Dimitri seems sufficiently distracted. “He really likes you now,” Dedue says, although Ashe can’t tell if it’s a statement or a warning. “You should probably prepare yourself. He can be very… enthusiastic about his affections.”

“It can’t be that bad,” Ashe argues.

Dedue shakes his head like Ashe has no idea.

Come the next day, when Dimitri shows up after their last class again and tells Ashe, very earnestly, “I would like to court you,” Ashe realizes he really did have no idea.

“Uh,” is all Ashe manages. Dimitri doesn’t look anywhere close to joking. Beside him, Dedue shakes his head very slowly, as if he were watching a car crash in slow motion. Ashe clears his throat, and though he has no idea what sort of response he’s supposed to give, he doesn’t want to leave Dimitri hanging. “That’s… great?”

“Is that permission?” Dimitri asks, frowning.

Not for the first time, Ashe looks to Dedue for help. Dedue just continues shaking his head. Looks like the car crash is just starting. “I… I don’t—what?”

Now Dimitri looks confused, too. “Let me try for a few days,” he decides, seemingly on his own. Which is just as well, because it’s not like Ashe would have known what to decide on anyway. “If it is not to your liking, tell me what to do next.”

“I don’t think…” But Dimitri is already walking away, looking deep in thought. Ashe sighs. “What just happened?”

“Dimitri comes from a very traditional family,” Dedue finally decides to explain. “He studied in a private school for a few years, mostly surrounded by childhood friends, and… well, he was also taught about courting rituals. It’s something to do with how his parents’ parents did it, so on. So…”

Ashe gawks. “But—we barely know each other! We spoke, like, four times!”

“Once used to be enough,” Dedue muses, much to Ashe’s horror. “But I wouldn’t let it bother you. If it gets too much, just tell him to stop. This is his first time dealing with… er… feelings of this sort, I suspect.”

When Dedue puts it like that, Ashe _supposes_ it doesn’t sound completely weird. Maybe by “court,” Dimitri means stuff couples usually do when starting out, like going to cafés or the movies together? Maybe Ashe could just sort of… think of it as going out with a friend. Yeah. Not so bad. He’ll find a way to turn this car crash into something salvageable.

Once again, Ashe is hopelessly wrong.

First of all, Ashe just barely manages to convince Dimitri against holding a meeting between them and their parents, because Ashe has no inclination to talk to Mr. Very Rich Ambassador Blaiddyd, and he doubts Lonato does either. Then Dimitri asks what Ashe would rather do instead, and Ashe meekly suggests talking over coffee; this unfortunately means Dimitri brings him to the most expensive coffee shop Ashe has ever set foot in. A single large cup is nearly ¥1,000—Ashe doesn’t even want to look at a slice of cake.

At least Dimitri becomes easier to talk to the more he warms up to Ashe—he’s especially fond of his childhood friends, who all attend the same college they do, though scattered throughout different courses. And he’s far more passionate about psychology than he is politics, because whenever Ashe gets him to talk about it, Dimitri doesn’t stop for the next hour and a half.

So, okay, expensive coffee (that Dimitri pays for, despite Ashe’s protests). Not a bad first start, right? Ashe can bear with it, and listening to Dimitri is nice.

But it doesn’t stop there. Next, Dimitri asks for Ashe’s favorites and interests, and Ashe mumbles something about books, because that’s the easiest answer he can give, and he doesn’t expect Dimitri to do anything with the information. A few days later, Caspar nudges Ashe awake and tells him he’s got a gift, and that’s how Ashe wakes up at 7:30 in the morning to a half-dozen, hardbound, exclusive, _signed_ books.

The downside is that Dimitri probably didn’t know what sorts of books Ashe likes, because the topics range from handling finances to computer science to erotica, of all things. Ashe doesn’t even want to know why Dimitri has that, or how he’d gotten it _signed,_ but, well, he’ll take it. There’s a book on magical realism mixed in the pile, which is a great read and one of Ashe’s favorite genres, as well as a poetry collection that has him occupied for the better part of the following weekend. Dimitri had also taken the time to scratch out the prices, thankfully, so at least Ashe can feel marginally less guilty about how expensive these must have been.

The final straw is when Dimitri presents him with a dagger.

“What is this,” Ashe says. He means for it to come out as a question, but his voice has magically removed all inflection from the words.

Dimitri beams. “A traditional dagger. The _kaiken,_ to be more specific. It is a type of _tantou_ sword, primarily used for self-defense, but in modern times it is more commonly used for ornamental usage. Please accept it!”

Right. Weapons buff. Over the past few weeks, Ashe has learned more about traditional Japanese swords than he thinks he could have learned in a lifetime without Dimitri. “T… Thanks, but aren’t these, well. Expensive?”

“Our family has plenty,” Dimitri insists. The blade of the _kaiken_ blinks up at Ashe, friendly as a dagger can be. “They, um… These daggers are usually gifted to the people we want to protect. This meaning was ascribed by my family, not by traditions, but this does not change my feelings.” And he looks so pleading in that moment that Ashe has virtually no choice but to accept the dagger, even though he’s quite sure he’s never going to use it.

“Dimitri, I really appreciate it,” Ashe starts, smiling a little when Dimitri visibly brightens, “but, um… you really don’t need to do any of these… traditional courting rituals or whatever.”

“Oh.” Dimitri frowns. “Whyever not?”

“Well, it’s the 21st century,” Ashe points out. “Not saying you haven’t been very kind, but… there are other ways to show your feelings, I guess? That don’t involve huge sums of money?” He briefly remembers how his way of confessing to Linhardt those years ago had been through a character from a book, which is very 21st-century of him, albeit embarrassing.

Dimitri still looks a little lost, so Ashe gingerly adds, “I’m just saying, less might actually be more sometimes?” because outright telling him Ashe can’t see him as more than a friend sounds too awful. Besides, Ashe likes to think his fairly lukewarm reactions have made that sentiment obvious by now.

“Ah!” Dimitri claps his hands together. “That makes sense!”

Ashe really doesn’t want to know what Dimitri just made sense of. “So, uh, you get me?”

Dimitri nods, now looking entirely serious. “Less might be more. I understand. Thank you for being honest with me, Ashe.”

“O-Oh.” He sounds so solemn, Ashe wonders if Dimitri really _did_ understand what Ashe was trying to say there. “You’re fine with that, then?”

He means to say more, like, “It’s okay if we stay friends?” or “I’m sorry I can’t return your feelings,” or “I’m sure someone else out there will be better for you,” but Dimitri is nodding again and abruptly walking away before Ashe can add much else. _Oh…_ is he sad? Ashe hadn’t even gotten to clarify things, or at least reassure Dimitri that Ashe still wants to be friends with him. But, well, maybe Dimitri is the sort of person who needs to take time for himself first? Ashe really wishes he were better at this sort of thing, but Linhardt had been the only person he’d had much experience with, and the other guy isn’t exactly a role model.

Ashe sighs and turns back to head to his own dorm. Hopefully in a few days, he could seek Dimitri out and see if he would be ready to talk by then.

A few days pass. Dimitri approaches Ashe out of nowhere while Ashe is on his way to his next class and says, “I like you very much,” without any fanfare whatsoever.

Predictably enough, Ashe drops his books all over the floor. It really doesn’t help that half his mind is still preoccupied with his upcoming midterm exam, and he can’t think up an appropriate response in time before Dimitri’s brow scrunches in concern. “Ashe,” he’s saying, very seriously, “I took what you said to heart. Less might be more. I hope my words, simple though they may be, remain as genuine as they would have been if I had embellished further.”

A passerby in the hallway _ooh_ s before ducking into a nearby classroom.

“I… okay,” Ashe manages, but doesn’t really get any further than that. His only experience with relationships has been rejection—he’s wholly unequipped for the exact opposite of such. “Dimitri—”

Dimitri’s eyes widen. “‘Okay?’ Is that a yes? Do you feel the same?” He leans forward, smile the widest Ashe has ever seen it, clasping Ashe’s hands in his own. “Do you mean it? Do you accept my feelings?”

And—Ashe _knows_ he should refuse, because he really, really, _really_ doesn’t see Dimitri as more than a friend, but people in the hallway are starting to stop and stare at them, and the last thing Ashe wants to do is embarrass Dimitri in front of a bunch of strangers who’ll doubtless spread the story around in their free time. “Sure, okay,” Ashe weakly manages, prying his hands out of Dimitri’s iron grip. “Uh, can you help me… my books…”

“Ah! Right! Yes!” Dimitri crouches down and immediately scoops Ashe’s books in his arms, a smile on his face the whole while. “Thank you very much! I am around ten minutes late to a class now, so I must get going, but we absolutely have to speak later! Thank you!”

And then, before Ashe can stop him, Dimitri is pressing a kiss to his cheek in the middle of the hallway.

The veritable crowd of people gasp in near-unison. Dimitri drops the books in Ashe’s arm, then hurtles down the corridor, leaving Ashe to stare blankly at the empty air in front of him, the chaste touch of his lips spreading warmth through his face.

So maybe this relationship won’t be a totally bad idea after all?

Their first date costs just under half of their tuition fee, which says enough about the whole experience.

It’s a fancy restaurant, because of course it is. Dimitri asks Ashe when he’s free, Ashe lists off a few dates, and suddenly he’s got a reservation at a place he can’t even pronounce the name of. There’s the whole five courses, the table napkins have embroidery at the edges, an entire vase of flowers sits at the center of the table and hides Ashe entirely from Dimitri’s view… and there’s wine, to wrap it all up. Not really what Ashe had in mind for a first date, though to be fair he hadn’t had anything in mind, period.

But Dimitri is… nice. Ashe supposes his behavior doesn’t really change much, aside from how he smiles wider and bumps the back of his hand against Ashe’s more often.

And the kisses. Good gods, the _kisses._

They’re mostly on the cheek, so it’s not like they’re being indecent in public or whatnot, but Dimitri is _generous_ with kisses. He does it when he visits Ashe’s room, leaves Ashe’s room, _sees Ashe in the corridors,_ and sometimes for just no reason at all. Ashe does his best to reciprocate as much as he can, but it’s hard to get used to when, once again, his only experience with kissing involves books (and some badly-written fanfiction here and there, but he doesn’t talk about that). Seeing Dimitri smile like the sun whenever Ashe does it does feel nice, though.

But that’s Ashe’s problem—it only feels _nice._ Not heart-stopping, mind-blowing, world-ending happiness or whatever he thinks he should feel when his boyfriend is happy. Just… nice, in a vague sort of way, like reading a positive news article in the morning and feeling happy for someone far away. Because that’s what Dimitri feels—far away. Distant. Someone Ashe can be—and _wants_ to be—friends with, but not someone he thinks he can go any further with.

“You don’t have to keep spending so much money on me,” Ashe meekly says once, looking down at another book that had been too expensive for him. For Dimitri, it’d been nothing more than a glance and a nod. “Less is more, right?”

Dimitri frowns. “But you wanted that.” His speech, at least, has become a little less formal.

“Well, yeah, but I feel bad if you keep buying me way too expensive things.” _I can’t even pay any of this back._

“Oh. Hmm. I see.” Dimitri looks down at the pavement—they’re walking down the street a few minutes away from campus, because the weather is nice out today and they needed a break from all the studying. “I am sorry,” he eventually murmurs. “You’ve told me that many times, but I seem to keep forgetting.”

“N-No, it’s okay! Don’t worry about it.” Ashe tries not to wince—he hates slipping up and making Dimitri uncomfortable. A lot of things make Dimitri uncomfortable, and Ashe is still trying to keep track of the ever-growing list. “As long as you understand, it’s no worry. And thanks, really.”

Dimitri smiles, but it’s obviously forced. They walk in silence for another minute, early evening breeze ruffling their hair and clothes, before Dimitri speaks again. “I am sure you are already aware,” he says, “but I grew up… surrounded by people like me. People of my… status.”

“Yeah.” _The bourgeoisie,_ Ashe’s mind helpfully fills in. _The elite. The socialites. The nobles. I could keep going._

“I did not realize how different others were from us until recently.” Dimitri kicks a pebble on the sidewalk—it skitters across the ground before falling into the gutter. “And I did not realize it would be this hard to make friends outside of my immediate circle. So… thank you for being patient with me.”

 _It really isn’t a big deal,_ Ashe means to say, until he realizes Dimitri has stopped walking—he turns around to face him, cycling through every possible response, before wisely settling on, “Uh?”

They’re standing under a coffee shop awning. A light rain has begun to fall, dotting the ground and pattering against roofs and windows.

Dimitri looks Ashe in the eye. “May I kiss you?”

Ashe isn’t stupid enough to think Dimitri’s asking for permission for a cheek kiss. He swallows, steels himself, and nods instead of saying anything, because he doesn’t trust his voice to be steady.

So Dimitri kisses him, under that coffee shop awning, under the first rainfall of the month, and Ashe lets him.

He only remembers to smile when Dimitri does.

Ashe stares down at his lap. “Am I a horrible person?”

Linhardt, as dispassionate as ever, barely looks up from his book. “And… what do you want me to say to that?”

“I think med school has made you even worse.”

“You _think?_ I know it did.” Linhardt turns a page, but sighs and pushes it away, rolling to lie on his back on the bed instead of on his stomach, and gives Ashe an inquisitive look. “So this is all because you don’t want to tell someone you don’t like them?”

“It’s not as simple as you make it sound…”

“I think it is.” Linhardt narrows his eyes. Ashe is just glad he doesn’t have any pillows on hand at the moment, because he would have thrown them at Linhardt’s face by now, as stress relief. Linhardt has a bit of a hittable face. “What’s the matter with some nice, open, direct communication?”

Ashe sighs. “Not everyone can be as… straightforward as you.”

“You can say blunt. You were thinking it.”

“I… Okay, yeah, I was.”

“Of course you were. I’m very perceptive.” Linhardt closes his eyes, and if he went to sleep right then and there on Caspar’s bed, Ashe would let him. He’s not sure why he’d even asked the other man for advice on something like this. “Try it.”

“What? Nice, open, direct communication?”

“Yes. It might change your life, you never know.” Linhardt sounds like he might roll his eyes if they were open. “That’s the easiest and fastest solution I have to offer.”

Ashe frowns. “Any harder and slower solutions, then?”

“You could always take advantage of him and—”

“Never mind,” Ashe hastily interrupts. He may not like Dimitri in that way, but he isn’t about to _take advantage_ of him, in any way whatsoever. That’s just going to make Ashe a _really_ horrible person. “Come on, really? That’s all you have?”

“It’s what literally every other person would tell you, Ashe.” Linhardt cracks a single, deep blue eye open to look at him. “I’ve never met this Dimitri, but you make him sound like a decent person, so I am _quite sure_ he’ll understand. Maybe not right away, though, so I suggest preparing for that.”

“Yeah, that’s reassuring…”

Ashe lies back down on his own bed, staring at the ceiling. He doesn’t want to keep doing this. Not just for his sake, but for Dimitri’s, too…

A knock on the door. “Ashe? May I come in?”

 _Oh, hell._ Ashe had completely forgotten Dimitri was dropping by today. “Yeah, sure.” On the other bed, Linhardt doesn’t budge, though he does open both his eyes, which are now shining in curiosity. Great.

Dimitri enters like he always does: pushing the door open just a bit, peering in and looking around cautiously, then finally stepping inside and immediately shutting the door behind him. It’s like he’s permanently on guard for someone hunting him down. He smiles at Ashe—that same, million-watt smile everyone swoons over—but that fades quickly when he sees Linhardt lounging on Caspar’s bed. “Oh, hello. This is…”

“Linhardt. He’s a friend from med school. Just visiting.” Ashe clears his throat. Linhardt is very clearly pretending to not be paying attention. “Lin, this is Dimitri.”

Linhardt grudgingly pushes himself into a sitting position, his long hair all askew. “Nice to finally meet you,” Linhardt greets, though his voice is, as usual, impeccably insincere. “I’ve heard quite a lot about you.”

Dimitri reddens. “H-Have you?”

“But I should be off,” Linhardt dismisses, standing up and grabbing his coat; “Caspar’s waiting at the field. I’ll leave you two alone.” He gives Ashe a meaningful look, then strolls out of the room with a curt nod in Dimitri’s direction.

“Sorry about him,” Ashe apologizes, once the door closes behind Linhardt’s back. “He’s always been like that. Hold on a moment, then, I’ll get the tea.”

Dimitri sits stone-still at the edge of Ashe’s bed while Ashe rummages through his drawers for the teabags. He’d found a tea shop the other day, tucked in an oft-overlooked street, and the chamomile had been good enough to buy some home for Dimitri. “I don’t know many of your friends,” Dimitri says.

 _Probably because I don’t have many, period._ “Well, you know Caspar and Dedue,” Ashe says, “and now Linhardt. That’s sort of it.”

“You seem like the sort to have a large friend group.”

“Do I?” Ashe murmurs. Sure, he’s _friendly,_ but that doesn’t really equal having lots of friends. If anything, he’s too wary to be more than acquaintances with most of the people he encounters. Caspar was a special exception—when they first met late in elementary school, the boy had latched onto Ashe’s arm and refused to let go. And Ashe just couldn’t stay away whenever Dedue talked about succulents. “I’m pretty sure you have more friends than me, Dimitri.”

Dimitri laughs softly, barely a huff under his breath. Ashe has never heard Dimitri _laugh,_ like a full-belly laugh—honestly, most of the things Dimitri does make Ashe think of someone doing their utmost to keep attention away from them. “Oh, I… I don’t know about that.”

Ashe frowns, looking up from his drawer. “What d’you mean?”

“It… Well, it always feels like they like each other more than they like me.” Dimitri squirms in place, fiddling with his hands atop his lap. “Sylvain and Felix and Ingrid. Felix simply doesn’t like me. And though Sylvain and Ingrid _talk_ to me, they’ve always seemed more comfortable around each other… and of course I have Dedue, but… it’s different.” He looks up at Ashe. “You understand me?”

“Oh. Yeah, of course.” Caspar and Linhardt make an effort to involve him as much as possible, so that Ashe doesn’t feel left out, but they’re _best friends—_ they share more than Ashe could possibly dream of. “Yeah, I…”

Has Ashe ever had a best friend? He thinks he may have, once, but it was so long ago, he can barely remember…

“Hey, Dimitri?” When Dimitri looks up, Ashe sighs and fishes out the chamomile teabags from his drawer, setting them atop the desk. “I think… I should tell you something.”

Dimitri doesn’t look surprised. If anything, he looks expectant.

“Um… look. The thing is, I…” Why did Ashe decide to do this now? Why couldn’t he at least have written some sort of script beforehand, so that he doesn’t have to think of the appropriate words on the spot? His last two brain cells are fighting to the death in his head right now. “I don’t think we’re… you know—”

“Meant to be?” Dimitri finishes. His voice is calm, steady, and not at all what Ashe had expected.

Not the words Ashe would have gone for, personally, but they fit. “Yeah. I-I’m sorry, I should have brought it up earlier,” he stammers, “but it’s just—I thought I could like you. You know? I thought I could learn to like you the way you like me, but I—I don’t want to keep leading you on like this. You _are_ a good person, Dimitri, and I do want to be your friend, but… I just…”

_Can’t be happy with you, can’t bring myself to like you, can’t be the person you need me to be._

“I just can’t,” Ashe finishes, lamely.

For a while, there’s only silence in the room. And for once, Ashe breaks eye contact first.

“I see,” Dimitri eventually says, voice perfectly neutral. His hands are still, now, clenched into fists so tight his knuckles have gone pale. “If I may be honest, I was expecting this.”

“I’m sorry,” Ashe murmurs, knowing an apology isn’t going to fix anything.

“Don’t apologize,” Dimitri says, and he sounds so _sincere_ that Ashe almost wants to cry. “It isn’t your fault. I don’t know if I knew for sure, or if I simply had the feeling that this must not be how a relationship should feel… but I knew something would happen, sooner or later. I’m glad you brought it up.”

Ashe leans against his dresser, feeling a headache begin to descend. Looks like his brain cells have finished up their duel to the death. “You—If you’re mad at me, you can just… shout. It’s fine. I probably deserve it. I—”

“You do not,” Dimitri says, sternly. “Ashe. You are a good friend. I promise I would know.”

“But—”

“If you weren’t,” Dimitri interrupts, “you would have kept—what was the term you used?—leading me on.” He frowns, like just saying the words feels wrong. They certainly _sound_ wrong, considering it isn’t the sort of language Dimitri often uses. “I have been around many people who valued me—or my family—for my money. Which means it has become easy for me to tell whether a person truly values me for who I am.”

Quiet again. Ashe opens his mouth, but there’s nothing of substance for him to say. Dimitri smiles, crookedly, and stands up from his seat. “Thank you very much,” he says, as if there’s anything to thank Ashe for aside from wasted time. “Keep the tea for yourself.”

“W—Wait,” Ashe stutters, but Dimitri’s already left the room.

The soft sound of the door falling closed makes Ashe wish Dimitri had just slammed it shut.

4

_But now I never know the things to say to you, that help me prove that I'm still on your side…_

“Felix.”

_I never show just what you do to me, guess I’m what’s always wrong…_

“Felix!”

With a huff, Felix turns the volume down on his phone and turns his head just enough to face Ashe. “Yeah?” He’s lying on his bed while Ashe sits on the edge of Sylvain’s, Felix’s roommate.

“Uh… I was just wondering.” Ashe shrugs. “What do you want to do after graduation?”

Felix’s brow furrows. “What kinda question is that?”

“Just answer, please?”

“I don’t know,” Felix eventually mumbles. “Music, maybe. Why do you care?”

“Of course I care. We’re…”

Ashe trails off there, because they’re… what? They’re not dating, are they? They have to at least be friends, but even then Ashe isn’t sure about that. By this point, he’s pretty sure Felix has a completely different definition for “friends” than most people. “You know,” Ashe says, eloquently.

Felix snorts and turns the volume back up, and that’s the end of the short-lived conversation. Ashe sighs—it had lasted a little longer than the average time, at least.

Ashe had seen Felix around a few times, but they’d never really spoken. They first met through Sylvain, after the man wandered into the wrong classroom and sat beside Ashe for half an hour until finally saying, “Huh, this isn’t calculus,” in the middle of a discussion on plant anatomy and physiology. Ashe helped Sylvain find his way back to his dorm, because apparently he was too stoned out of his head to think past putting one foot in front of the other, and a disgruntled Felix had greeted them at the door.

Felix seemed pretty rude at first, but Ashe figured out early on that it was just his own odd way of interacting, so Ashe rolled with it. He sort of reminded him of Linhardt in one of his bad moods, only Felix is a perpetually-bad-mood Linhardt and significantly harder to handle. Anyway, one thing led to another, and on one hungover morning, Ashe suddenly woke up naked in Felix’s bed. He’d rather not elaborate on the hows and whys.

“It’s just that,” Ashe decides to continue, speaking over the music, “it’s our final exams soon, and I don’t really know what to do once we’re out of here.”

Felix sighs. “Yeah?”

He doesn’t turn down the volume, but he doesn’t tell Ashe to shut up, so Ashe takes it as an invitation. “And it looks like everyone else knows what to do already. My roommate wants to be a public defender. I have a friend in med school. You want to go into music.”

“Mm.” _They’ll tell me that it’s just bad luck, when will I find where I fit in…_

“And I’m just… me.” Ashe stares down at his textbook. He’d been trying to squeeze in some studying after dropping by the dorm, but nothing is processing in his head right now. “Nothing special. It’s just… you know what I mean, right?”

Felix looks at him, nods. “Yeah.” And he doesn’t offer anything else. Ashe supposes he should have expected this.

The thing about Felix is that he just doesn’t seem to care much. Apparently he was several times worse when he was younger, actively driving everyone away and insisting he didn’t need friends, but he’d either mellowed out over the years or gotten so exhausted to the point that caring too much held less appeal than just not caring at all.

Sure, Felix _can_ care about things, if he wants to. He’s an unexpectedly good student. He takes his music seriously. And he likes his friends… most of them. He’s always considerate of Ashe whenever they have sex, and there’s a thoughtfulness to his aftercare that Ashe doesn’t think comes easily to other people. But outside of his immediate care-zone, Felix is just… completely apathetic. Ashe supposes it’s because he hardly ever shares his own problems with other people, and because of that he expects others to treat him much the same, but…

“Hey.” Felix sits up just enough to make better eye contact. “It’s late. Quit studying. You wanna go get dinner?”

It’s the small things like these. Ashe thinks he should be grateful Felix does these at all, because for Felix, offering to go get dinner with someone is like a proclamation of undying friendship or whatever Sylvain said one time before he got pummeled to a pulp. But Ashe wishes he doesn’t have to _settle._

He forces a smile. “Sure. It’s on me.”

“What do you want to do after graduation?”

Dedue doesn’t respond instantly, which Ashe hadn’t been expecting anyway—he focuses on watering each of his plants first, giving just the right amount for each flower and succulent sitting on the windowsill, before speaking. “A restaurant.”

Ashe smiles. “Yeah, that sounds like you.”

“A café sounds good as well,” Dedue muses, setting the watering can next to the plants. Behind them, Dimitri is curled up in bed, tapping away at his phone. Apparently, he’s been introduced to gacha games, which Ashe cannot see ending well for anyone involved. “Whichever comes first. I’m not picky. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I… don’t know what I want to do. So I’ve been asking others around.”

“What, for inspiration?”

Ashe laughs softly. His breath ruffles the smaller leaves on the plants nearest to him. “I guess. It sounds stupid when I say it like that, huh.”

Dedue shakes his head. “Why did you take up botany as a major?”

“I like gardening?”

“You could open a flower shop.”

“I could,” Ashe agrees, but it’s halfhearted at best. “I don’t know. It’s just… weird, being suddenly thrust out into the world without any knowledge of what to do next. It’s not like I know the first thing about running my own business. Didn’t exactly cover that one in paleobotany, did they?”

Dedue chuckles, folding his arms over his chest. “If you are so unsure, whatever café I decide to open up could use a chef. You like cooking as well, don’t you?”

Ashe feels his eyes widen. “Seriously?”

“I certainly would not be asking Sylvain for help anytime soon.”

“That’s fair,” Ashe laughs. “Okay. You got it, boss.” He mostly gets takeout when with friends, but it looks like all his practice in the dorm kitchen at 2am will finally be put to use.

People go their separate ways. Ashe knows this. He knows it better than anyone.

Graduation is… something. Lonato had taken an early flight back from his business trip overseas to attend, so he looks sleep-deprived and ready to collapse at any given moment, but he hugs Ashe tight and congratulates him on a degree a stricter parent would call useless. Ashe’s younger siblings doze off during the ceremony and completely miss the speech Edelgard, top-performing student of the year, delivers; Christophe insists on taking pictures that all turn out blurry, with one exception being a photo where Ashe is caught half-blink.

Whispers follow wherever Dimitri and Edelgard’s parents pass, while their children just look uncomfortable with the attention; Edelgard elbows Dimitri every time he begins to space out. Ashe spots Caspar standing alone by the water fountain, staring down at his phone, and drags him by the elbow to stick with his family until a frazzled Linhardt finally shows up and pulls him into an uncharacteristic hug.

Felix, waving off his father and older brother, approaches Ashe alone. “Hey,” he says, voice low. He’s got earphones plugged in, the wire hidden under the hoodie he had immediately pulled on as soon as the ceremony finished.

“Hi, Felix,” Ashe cautiously greets. He has a feeling he knows what this is about.

“Congratulations.”

“Congratulations,” Ashe returns, smiling a little. So Felix _can_ be polite, even when he had grumbled about how graduation ceremonies were far too much fanfare for far too small an accomplishment for weeks.

Felix shakes his head. “I’m breaking it off.”

“Oh.”

“Whatever we were. It was nice, but I’m done.” Felix gives Ashe a scrutinizing look. “Pretty sure you are, too.”

Ashe is, but he doesn’t want to come out and say it. “I… I guess.” Is he supposed to be sad right now? He is supposed to be sad right now, the same way he was supposed to feel happy when Dimitri kissed him. “Thanks, Felix.”

“For what?” Felix huffs.

“For whatever we were.” Ashe smiles again. It doesn’t feel as forced as he thinks it should be, either. “It was nice.”

He watches Felix walk away, rejoin his family, and leave the hall—and Ashe is supposed to be sad, supposed to be asking why Felix hadn’t tried harder, why they had to end here, but—mostly he’s just relieved Felix had been the one to end things, because Ashe hadn’t wanted to do it himself.

People go their separate ways. Ashe knows this. But sometimes he wishes people came back, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [the song felix was listening to](https://open.spotify.com/track/15qf0H31MChhqKr2zvejla)
> 
> next chapter: parts 5-7


	2. and he happened to get in the way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > The only thing that really processes in Ashe’s head is that Yuri’s hair is longer now.
>> 
>> Considering elementary school had been over a decade ago, Ashe is fairly sure he can’t trust the memories tucked deep in the recesses of his mind, but somehow he’s also fairly sure Yuri’s hair hadn’t been as long as it is now. It used to just reach until somewhere around his neck, right? Or maybe a little lower than that? But now it reaches down to his chest, the strands curling at the ends, and Ashe has a fleeting thought about how it would have been the perfect length for the bullies to pull.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not @ how this is almost twice the length of the previous chapter
> 
> please note the tag! there are some descriptive but non-explicit mentions of past prostitution that you can skip starting from "Got involved in a bunch of illegal business." to "Besides, I found a better business opportunity after a while."

5

_Vegetables…_ Ashe checks the little box off his list. _Next is milk._ Mercedes had shared her recipe on oats, and Ashe has been running on two paltry meals a day recently. Maybe if he has something quick and filling to eat for breakfast everyday, he could—

His arm bumps into someone else’s as he reaches for a milk carton, and Ashe immediately draws back. “Ah, sorry! Excuse me.”

Normally he wouldn’t give the other person a second glance, aside from maybe an apologetic look, but they recoil so sharply and defensively that the movement is hard to miss; Ashe looks at them, trying to hide his curiosity, and blinks when they avert their face away from view, hiding it under a curtain of lavender hair. “Excuse me.”

“Are you alright?” Ashe tentatively asks. He’s not sure why, because he could just get the milk and walk away from this—it’s not like the person knows him, or the other way around. But…

“I’m fine,” they mutter, and they reach out towards the milk again; “you can take it,” they say, but they visibly flinch again when their arm stretches all the way out.

The long sleeve of their jacket slips down, revealing pale skin mottled with bruises.

“Oh,” Ashe can’t help but murmur—it’s hard not to, when the harsh purple and green contrast so greatly against everything else. The person backs away again, turning just enough to shoot Ashe a look—they’re not glaring, per se, but one look in those eyes has Ashe taking his own step back in caution. It feels as if they’re assessing every little thing about him, probably down to the items he has in his basket. “Uh…”

“Here.” They hand over the milk carton. Out of lack of other things to do, Ashe takes it, and looks one more time into the person’s face.

Ashe drops the milk.

“Yuri?”

The only thing that really processes in Ashe’s head is that Yuri’s hair is longer now.

Considering elementary school had been over a decade ago, Ashe is fairly sure he can’t trust the memories tucked deep in the recesses of his mind, but somehow he’s also fairly sure Yuri’s hair hadn’t been as long as it is now. It used to just reach until somewhere around his neck, right? Or maybe a little lower than that? But now it reaches down to his chest, the strands curling at the ends, and Ashe has a fleeting thought about how it would have been the perfect length for the bullies to pull.

He waves the thought away. “How’ve you been?” Ashe asks instead, unable to keep himself from smiling brightly. Yuri looks up from his cup of tea, the faint plumes of steam rising to hide his face. “I didn’t recognize you for a second there!”

“Eh, well, it’s been a while.” Yuri idly stirs his tea, giving Ashe a lopsided smile. “I’ve been okay, it’s whatever. What about you? You said you work here, right?”

“Yeah! Dedue’s—ah, my friend, that is—his café’s doing really well, don’t you think?” Ashe gestures to the rest of the place—it’s quaint, but it’s grown in size over a few years and business is just steady enough that Ashe had finally been able to afford his own apartment nearby. A bit on the pricey side, but the accommodations are nice. And aside from taking care of all the cakes for the café, picking out the flowers to arrange in each vase on each table is fun, too. This month, the lavenders are in season, and Ashe can’t help but think about how they match Yuri’s eyes and hair. “But my life’s pretty boring, nothing that interesting—what about _you?_ I didn’t even know you were still in the country.”

Yuri shrugs. “Oh, you know, this and that. Nothing too special either.” He lifts his tea for a sip, and Ashe can’t help but glance at the bruise peeking out from under his sleeves again. They’re awful, worse than just any injury you get by falling down the stairs or running into a door. “Sorry I never told you I was… transferring,” Yuri murmurs, setting his cup down with a _clink._ “There just wasn’t much time.”

“Oh, that’s… it’s fine, Yuri. That was forever ago, anyway.” _Long enough that I started to doubt you even existed._ “So, what do you do? Odd jobs or something, then?”

“Something like that,” Yuri easily agrees. He leans back against his seat, giving Ashe another one of his smiles—Ashe could swear the Yuri he knew never gave out smiles this easily. “So this friend of yours, what’re they like? Come on, I’m curious. Looked like a total hunk, from the five seconds of him I saw. You two wouldn’t happen to be, you know…”

Ashe feels his face heat up. “What? No way! We’re just friends!” Though there had been a time… nope, no, Ashe is not thinking about that again. Those two weeks were hard enough to live through. “But yeah, Dedue’s really nice. He offered me the job just before we graduated…”

It’s hard to concentrate when Yuri, the boy Ashe had almost begun to think was an imaginary friend, is sitting right in front of him, in the flesh, after 15 years of complete radio silence. Ashe had searched his name up a few times, just to see if there would be any evidence of his existence, but _Yuri_ was a fairly common name, and without knowing his surname, the search was fruitless from the start. Seeing him again now seems almost like a dream Ashe could wake up from at any moment.

So he talks. If nothing else, it’s the one thing he’s mastered throughout all his years in education—talk just enough, just the right amount for each person, and people start to like you. Yuri, Ashe remembers, wasn’t a child of many words, so Ashe filled in the silence for the both of them more times than he can count. Even after all these years apart, it looks like this, at least, has stayed the same.

It’s nearing the sunset when Yuri sighs and stretches his arms over his head. “Well, it’s getting late,” he says, visibly trying to stifle a yawn at the end. “I’ve got an appointment in a few hours, so I need to go. But it was great catching up with you, Ashe.”

Ashe hasn’t heard Yuri say his name in years. “Yeah,” he says, smiling perhaps a little too sincerely up at Yuri. “I missed you, you know.”

Yuri shakes his head. “You’re still a big softie.”

“Hey!”

“But I missed you too.” Yuri grins. “Today was fun. I’ll get going now.”

Like an idiot, Ashe watches Yuri leave the café until the bell above the doors stops tinkling and his back disappears from view. “You two look close,” Dedue comments from where he’s standing by the counter.

“Yeah. Childhood friends.” Ashe stands up, already starting to clean up what little mess they left on the table. It’s not his shift on the weekends, but he’s already here, so he might as well stay until closing time. “But he transferred schools, and I didn’t hear from him again until today.”

And though talking to Yuri again _had_ been great, it doesn’t escape Ashe’s notice that he had barely learned anything new about the other man—every time Ashe had tried to get him to talk more about himself, Yuri always circled the conversation back to Ashe, somehow knowing what topics to raise to get Ashe babbling on until he’d exhausted the subject. Yuri had walked out of the café knowing more about Caspar and Linhardt than Ashe knows about Yuri now.

Ashe hadn’t even asked about the bruises. But maybe Yuri would have avoided that question, too.

Dedue hums in acknowledgement. “You’re staying?”

“Will you still take me if I’m not in uniform?”

“What a difficult decision,” Dedue murmurs. “Please, by all means. And look—your favorite is coming.”

 _Favorite?_ Ashe hastily clears his table of clutter and brings the used plates and glasses towards the counter before he turns around to look—as Dedue promised, the tall, blue-haired man who frequents the café has just entered, dressed in the cute pale yellow sweater vest and his typical black coat. “Dedue, he’s not my _favorite._ ”

“You say that, but you volunteer to take all his orders,” Dedue points out, “and you seem to dawdle extra long at his table, don’t you think?”

“Gah.” So what if the man’s… well… good-looking? Ashe blames his facial bone structure—it’s simply too impeccable to be true, and it’s honestly a waste to just take the man’s order without admiring him a little bit while Ashe is at it. He might as well, after all—all their other regular customers are more eyesores than anything. “Okay, well… he’s nice, alright?”

Dedue looks distinctly unconvinced. “Why don’t you go take his order.”

Ashe goes take his order. “Good evening,” he greets, as always—the sunset light comes in through their windows, tinting one side of the man’s face in brilliant pink and orange rays. “Nice to see you again. What’ll it be today?”

The man shrugs listlessly. “The usual.” He has a stack of papers on the two-person table already, and Ashe tries to sneak a subtle glance at the content. Are they test papers? “Oh, and some blueberry cake, actually,” he adds. “My sister’s coming over.”

Ashe feels his eyebrows raise of their own accord. “Sister?”

“Yeah. She’s running late.” The man pauses and looks up from the papers, blinking blandly up at Ashe. “Actually, what do you recommend? I want to branch out a little.”

Which is probably a good thing, because Ashe doubts eating strawberry pancakes every week just before dinner is healthy for the man. “Today’s special is matcha cheesecake,” he recites. “Soft texture made to melt in your mouth. Baked by yours truly.”

“Oh.” The man’s eyes widen. “You made it? I’ll have a slice, then, please.”

 _Huh? Wait, so he’ll only get it because I made it?_ Ashe scribbles the orders down on his notepad, pretending his handwriting isn’t an illegible mess, and manages a shaky smile through the warmth in his cheeks. “Alright. Please wait a few minutes.” And then, before he can overanalyze the man’s words and his little smile any longer, Ashe flees back to the counter.

Dedue gives him a look. “That looked… interesting.”

“He wants the matcha cheesecake today,” Ashe faintly manages. He’d baked enough this morning to serve as today’s special, but he definitely hadn’t been expecting the man to actually get some. What if it isn’t to his tastes? “Do you think it still tastes good?”

“You… made those.” Dedue stares at him. “Shouldn’t you know?”

“Well, _yeah,_ but I need a second opinion—”

“He ordered it, so go ahead and give it. Do you think your cheesecakes magically became horrible within the day?”

Dedue has a point, as he always does, so Ashe hurries to get a slice, along with some of Mercedes’ blueberry cake. Once he’s got everything balanced on a tray, he calms himself down, pretends his thoughts hadn’t been sent through a blender and popped out as mush, and heads towards the man’s table. “Thank you for waiting…”

The woman sitting across him looks up. “Oh, hey, thanks.”

Ashe almost drops the tray entirely. Is that his _sister?_ Aside from hair length, they look almost entirely alike, down to the pile of what look like essay papers on the table in front of her. Maybe they’re twins? “Ah…”

The woman looks back at her brother. “Hey, clear out some space, Byleth.”

“Why me?” the man—Byleth?—grumbles. “You clear some out yourself, Byleth.”

The woman—huh? Byleth?—rolls her eyes and shoves both paper stacks to the edges of the table. If the sheets hadn’t been clipped together, Ashe dreads to think of what could have happened. “Thank you,” Ashe manages, setting the tray down and placing the respective orders in front of the siblings, as well as two glasses of water. “So, um, you’re his sister?”

She nods, bringing up a smile that looks far more natural than when her brother does it. “Do you know him well? He’s always trying to get me to come here, says their pancakes are great.”

Ashe shoots the other Byleth—oh, this is going to get _confusing_ —a curious look, only for the man to stare fixedly down at the table, hiding the lower half of his face behind a sheet of paper. “That’s nice to hear,” Ashe says, smiling—Mercedes used to take care of the pancakes, but when Byleth had first visited, Mercedes had taken the day off, and Ashe filled in for her. After finding out Byleth had decided to start having the strawberry pancakes on the regular, Ashe asked (read: nearly begged) Mercedes to let him _keep_ making them.

Byleth glances up at him, expression unreadable, before looking back at his sister. “Just eat and grade.”

“He’s a teacher, by the way,” his sister continues, as if Byleth hadn’t spoken at all. “In elementary school. Great with kids. You know, just if you were wondering.”

“He wasn’t,” Byleth hisses. “ _Eat and grade._ ”

His sister rolls her eyes, but brightens quickly when she looks down at the slice of blueberry cake. Taking this as his cue to leave, Ashe gives them a polite _please enjoy the meal_ and hastens back to the counter once again, sneaking a glance as soon as he’s safely behind Dedue’s back. Both slices are already being demolished at an admirable rate—Ashe tries not to preen too much.

After setting some pastries in the display, Dedue squints across the rest of the tables and customers. “Is that… a sister? They look similar.”

“Yeah. She’s…” Ashe trails off, unable to decide on which word to use. _Pretty_ doesn’t quite cut it, _cute_ sounds like an understatement—

“Are they both your favorites now?”

“ _Dedue,_ ” Ashe says, his voice sounding remarkably similar to a whine. “They’re just… well… it’s unfair that they have to share the same genes while both having their individual charms! Byleth’s all handsome and mysterious while Byleth’s friendly and—”

“They’re both named Byleth?”

“I think they’re twins.”

“I assumed,” Dedue dryly responds, to Ashe’s laugh. “Not an excuse to share the same _name,_ atop everything else. Oh, they finished their cakes. Has it even been a minute?”

Ashe sighs, crossing his arms above the display case and resting his chin atop them. “I wouldn’t mind getting them another slice… or the rest of the cake… we’ve still got enough of the matcha and blueberry, don’t we?”

If Dedue were a less patient man, Ashe is fairly sure he would have been smacked over the head by now. “Please control yourself.” Then, after a considering pause, “If you invited them to your own apartment, you could serve your own cakes without getting the business involved.”

Ashe stares up at him. “What the…”

“Simply a suggestion.”

“Were you telling me to—”

“I was suggesting.” But Dedue is smiling like he hadn’t been _suggesting_ so much as _planting the idea in Ashe’s head to tempt him into a life of debauchery._ “Though I would also suggest actually talking more to them first before you attempt anything.”

Ashe straightens, glancing at the siblings again. “Talking, huh.” It certainly sounds easy, when Dedue puts it that way. And yet, at the thought of getting to know these people more, to making friends, to getting into a relationship again…

It’s not as if Ashe is cursed or something, because he’s fairly sure he hasn’t done anything to warrant a supernatural being placing a curse on him—he hopes not, anyway—and it’s not as if this is college either. But… why do all his relationships fail? Sure, it’s only been two people so far, because there had never even been a relationship in Linhardt’s case, but surely Ashe should have enjoyed himself a bit more than he did during both times. Mostly all he can remember when recalling the people he was with are not-so-good memories.

And really, he doesn’t want to make any more.

“I don’t know,” Ashe eventually says, looking away to stare out the windows at the darkening sky. “I don’t think I’m cut out for that stuff.”

Dedue frowns. “Relationships?”

“I… guess I’m just not looking for one right now?” But even as Ashe says this, he knows it’s a lie. A relationship he’s actually happy in sounds like it could make the trouble of waking up everyday actually worth it. “Or more like… no, I think I just… oh, never mind.”

“There’s no harm in trying,” Dedue says, after giving Ashe a worried glance Ashe only catches in his peripheral vision. “You could make a new friend.”

“No.” Ashe picks at a loose thread on his shirt. “I’m fine.” And then, because he’d sounded a bit too somber there, “I’ll just admire them from afar. Sounds nice to me!”

Dedue shoots him another, more concerned look, but doesn’t press the subject any further.

_Ugh…_ the area is too dark to walk through this late at night, with almost all the nearby streetlights faulty and flickering. Ashe briefly considers turning back and saving this errand for the morning, but then he remembers he doesn’t even have any clean clothes to use anymore, so he forges on. The laundromat is just a minute away, anyhow.

Another few dragging steps, and Ashe sighs in relief at the sight of the laundromat just by his apartment—he really shouldn’t have put off doing the laundry for so long, but he has to admit that procrastinating really isn’t one of his finer points. Oh, well, at least he’s doing it… now…

“Huh?” Ashe nearly drops his basket of clothes on his foot. “Yuri?”

Of all people, Yuri’s standing just beside the doorway of the laundromat, leaning against the wall and talking to someone on the phone, his words inaudible from here. Ashe steps closer, but as soon as Yuri notices, he mutters something under his breath and tucks his phone back in his pocket. “Hey. What’re you doing up so late?”

“Uh. Laundry.” Ashe would gesture vaguely at his clothes if both his hands weren’t occupied. “Wait, no—what are _you_ doing here? I feel like I keep seeing you around recently.”

“Just waiting for a friend,” Yuri says, tilting his head with a smile. For some reason, his answer is strangely unnerving, like Yuri knows Ashe knows there’s something more to the words. “Bit late to be doing laundry, isn’t it?”

Ashe sighs. “I thought the same, until I realized I didn’t have any more clean clothes for work tomorrow.” _And you, Yuri?_ his mind supplies. _Bit late to be meeting a friend in front of a laundromat, isn’t it?_ Ashe has been living in the area for a while, and yet this is the first time he’s seen Yuri around. Maybe Yuri’s job, whatever it is, requires him to be here often? It’s one of the only reasons he can think of for Yuri’s sudden appearances all around town.

“Well, okay,” Ashe says, instead of voicing everything aloud. Yuri blinks, looking almost surprised. “Will you be able to get back home safely, though? The trains don’t run overnight here. If you want, you could…”

“I’ll be fine.”

“My apartment’s just over there,” Ashe adds. He doesn’t mean to be insistent, but somehow he can’t help but worry over the other man, like they’re both still ten years old and Yuri still winces whenever he meets the eyes of a bully across the hall.

“There, huh?” Yuri smiles, but even the darkness of night can’t obscure what little sincerity he shows. “Really, I’ll be alright. You worry too much.”

“I guess I do,” Ashe sighs. “I’ll head in, then. Keep safe, please.”

The laundromat is deserted at this time of night—or early morning, if he’s being specific. Ashe loads in his clothes, and only when the machine starts whirring does he let his thoughts return to Yuri, who’s still standing outside, leaning against the glass wall. Ashe doesn’t want to pry, since it seems like Yuri’s still as private a person as ever, but he can’t deny being curious. If he isn’t lying and he really _is_ meeting a friend here, then it shouldn’t be a big deal if Ashe sees who this friend looks like, right? Just to be safe.

With the sounds of the washing machine having faded into background noise, Ashe easily catches the sudden rumble of an engine from outside—he glances back towards the walls, making sure not to be too obvious that he’s peeking. A sleek, expensive-looking car is parked just outside the laundromat, and someone steps out of the driver’s seat. Ashe tilts his head, and the laundromat lights shine down to illuminate the figure’s face as he moves to stand—

Ashe nearly kicks the washing machine. The broad shoulders, the mustache, the atrocious sense of fashion…

Isn’t that his _landlord?_

The same person Caspar routinely curses out for making the rent so high? The same person who gives Ashe headaches at least once a week just by existing? The same person Linhardt has offered to cut open and dissect more than once? What the hell is he doing with _Yuri?_

The walls are glass, which means if Ashe gets closer to the duo to listen to their conversation, he’ll be noticed. Ashe glances around, eventually deciding to walk as casually as possible towards the trash bin near the doorway, finding a crumpled receipt conveniently left in his jeans pocket. Now, if he nudges the door open with his foot just a little…

“Apologies for my lateness,” Ashe hears. He tries not to cringe—yeah, no mistaking it now. That’s the voice of his landlord, and coincidentally also the voice that narrates his nightmares. “I hope you weren’t waiting long.”

A soft giggle—Ashe has to keep himself from doing a double take. He’s _never_ heard Yuri sound like that. His memories may be fuzzy, and most of them feel more like dreams than actual past events, but he just _knows._ “No worries. I’m just glad you’re here.”

There’s a short pause, and Ashe hurries to actually throw the receipt in the garbage bin. He sneaks a glance behind him, just in time to make the most awkward eye contact of his life with his landlord.

Seconds pass. Ashe can’t bring himself to look away. Is he supposed to say something in this situation? _Hey, what are you talking about with my friend whom I haven’t seen in over ten years but you look really close to for some reason? Why are you even meeting up at 1am and acting like this is some really shady business? Lastly, could you please lower the rent for this month, because you’re definitely going to ask for it next week and I really don’t think I’ll have enough?_

Then the man smiles, turning away from Ashe and back to Yuri. “It’s rather cold out here. Why don’t we take this somewhere more… private?”

 _Private!?_ Ashe wants to fly out of the laundromat, never mind if he has to shatter glass to do so, then grab his landlord by his collar and shake him back and forth. _Don’t you dare bring him to a secondary location!_ And then, to Yuri: _You’re sleeping with my landlord!?_ That, at least, would answer the question of why Yuri is in the area, but that does nothing for Ashe’s mental health!

 _No, no, calm down._ This might be a bit… weird, but it also isn’t really Ashe’s business, is it? He just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then again, being at the laundromat at 1am in itself already sounds pretty wrong, but that’s not the point here. The point is that this isn’t his business… the point is that Ashe shouldn’t get involved…

What the hell? This _is_ his business. That’s _his_ landlord, and _his_ friend. Ashe steels himself for a confrontation, then pushes the doors open and steps out…

Just in time to catch Yuri stepping in the passenger’s seat, right as the car zooms off.

Ashe stares blankly into the distance.

_What just happened…?_

“So… let me sum that up.” Caspar takes a long, loud sip of his smoothie. “You met up with some guy you haven’t seen since you were, like, ten.”

Ashe nods. “Yep.”

“He acted real shifty about what he does for a living and what he’s been up to when he was gone.”

“Yeah.”

“And now you’re telling me that you caught him sneaking around and getting into cars with Mr. Cash Money at 1 in the morning?”

“Uh-huh.”

Dedue gives them both a disgruntled look. “I don’t mind if you’re going to discuss this, but could you please do it on your own table?”

“Oh, right,” Ashe mumbles sheepishly. He hasn’t been able to talk to Caspar about any of this until the weekend after the landlord incident, when both of them are free from work. Linhardt, unfortunately, is still stuck in the prison that is med school; double unfortunate, because Linhardt is the one who loves gossip most among the three of them. “Sorry, Dedue.” He’s just too used to having conversations on the counter.

Dedue shakes his head. “Speaking of your landlord—”

“Mr. Cash Money,” Caspar proudly suggests.

“…Yes, him… I saw him the other day, on my way to the station. He looked… troubled.”

Ashe feels his eyes widen. “Troubled?” Usually he’s not the sort of person who gets satisfaction from other people’s problems, because that just sounds _mean,_ but when it’s someone like his landlord…

“Troubled!?” Caspar echoes, hopping excitably. Evidently enough, he has absolutely none of Ashe’s concerns. “Do you know why?”

Dedue’s too polite to actually say it, but Ashe is fairly sure he’s wondering if Caspar knows what he’s saying right now. “No. There were no convenient hints on his person, nor did he have anyone to spill his problems to, so.”

“Aw, man.” Caspar deflates. “But if that was just this week, maybe it’s got something to do with your friend, Ashe. Maybe whatever happened in the secondary location didn’t go as planned?”

“Maybe.” Ashe frowns. He can’t really think of how Yuri would factor into this, though, especially since his landlord had seemed so happy to see him. Besides, it’s not as if there’s some sort of outlandish explanation for this, like Yuri conning him out of all his money somehow, right? It sounds too good to be true… and also too _terrible_ to be true, considering something like that would mean an even greater increase in rent. Ashe shudders just thinking about it.

Caspar sips his smoothie ridiculously loudly again, snapping Ashe out of his downward spiral of thoughts. “Anyway, since we’re free, wanna play? I brought Smash Bros.”

“Oh, sure.” Ashe grins. He still has to think about how to convince his landlord to lower the rent, or at least let him have a few days to earn more, but it’s been a while since both his and Caspar’s schedules lined up enough to let them have free time together. “We need to settle our score once and for all.”

“Score? I’ll show you a _score!_ Lin hasn’t beaten me once ever since we started!”

“Isn’t that just because he’s too lazy to play…”

Caspar has to get going at 6, so Ashe makes him some packed dinner that’s enough to last until tomorrow’s breakfast, though Ashe isn’t counting on Caspar to hold back anyway. It’s as Ashe’s walking back from the station after bringing Caspar there that he sees it—a familiar head of purple hair, the longer strands draped loosely over shoulders.

“Yuri?” Ashe almost calls out—then he stops short, when he sees the person standing in front of Yuri. _What the… again?_

The station is as busy and crowded as ever, which means it’s the sort of place no one would give you a second glance in. Ashe leaps for a narrow gap between the walls, close enough to overhear the duo’s conversation but just far enough to keep himself from being noticed.

One glance at Yuri’s face and Ashe can already tell this conversation is far from being along the same lines as last week. “So? Do we have an agreement?”

“You…” His landlord grits his teeth. Ashe doesn’t think he’s seen the man more riled up. “So you were a scam this whole time!?”

“Don’t bother raising your voice. No one here’s on your side.”

Poison drips from his words; they sound acidic enough to burn right through the floor. Ashe stares at Yuri, now uncaring if he’s being blatant about it—he’s never heard Yuri speak like this before either. When did he become so threatening? Rather, when did he learn to become so threatening?

There’s a tense silence between the two—Yuri folds his arms across his chest, leaning on his left leg, and Ashe’s landlord grinds his teeth hard enough that Ashe can almost hear it from here. Then, finally: “Fine!” his landlord snaps. A passing train station attendant gives them an odd look. “You win, alright? Now leave me alone!”

Yuri tilts his head, as if considering. “And… how do I know you won’t turn back on your word the second I’m out of here?”

“The hell do you want? Monthly evidence?”

“Huh, sounds nice. Thanks for the suggestion.” Yuri smiles—no, that’s not the right word. Yuri _sneers,_ enough that Ashe can see the tiniest glint of teeth. “Hold on to that promise, then, alright? I’d hate to see what I’ll have to do if you don’t.”

“You…!”

“Well, got to get going,” Yuri just about sings, tucking his hands into his coat pockets. “Business calls elsewhere. These past few weeks have been just wonderful with you—”

“Bastard!” Ashe’s landlord surges forward, grabbing Yuri’s arm in what looks like an iron-tight grip—Yuri pulls back seconds before, but he isn’t fast enough, and the man’s hand clamps down on his wrist. Yuri’s face seems to undergo a variety of emotions before settling on mild irritation, but Ashe catches the hint of pain that had flickered across his eyes. _The bruises! They’re still not healed?_ “You’re just gonna fucking leave? After what you did!?”

Yuri’s hands curl into fists. “Let go of me.”

“Hah!? Shut up and listen to—”

“Let _go,_ ” Yuri snarls, wrenching his hand back again, but the man holds tight—and Ashe realizes that if there’s one thing about Yuri that hasn’t changed much over the years, it’s his physical strength. Pain pulls his lips down into a scowl, and this time the landlord notices, because he squeezes even harder on Yuri’s wrist. “Quit fucking around, asshole!”

People are starting to stop and stare, and any second now someone’s probably going to step up and defuse the situation, right? No need for Ashe to get involved, right? Because his hands are shaking and he doesn’t trust himself to take so much as a step forward, lest he trip over air and make his own scene. _Yuri’s in trouble,_ his mind is repeating, over and over. _Yuri’s in trouble, Yuri’s in trouble, I have to help, I have to help—_

And it feels just like being ten years old again, watching three boys drown someone else in the swimming pool Ashe could never look at the same afterwards—

“Hey!” someone shouts, and it takes Ashe a second to realize that’s _him,_ that’s _his_ voice, _he’s_ the one running over to Yuri and his landlord like a complete idiot instead of just minding his own business like he should have done since last week. “What are you doing? Let go of him!”

“Ubert?” his landlord sputters. His grip slackens, probably out of surprise, enough to let Yuri jerk his arm away with a hiss. “What are you… This is…”

“It’s _harassment,_ ” Yuri bites out. He glances at Ashe, but gives no other hint that he recognizes him. Then, pitching his voice even louder, “I said I don’t want to go home with you, alright? Wasn’t once enough?”

The growing crowd around them erupts into whispers and murmurs, shooting the landlord disgusted glares. The station attendant from earlier returns, this time accompanied by a pair of security guards—Yuri’s eyes visibly widen at the sight, and Ashe hurries to shout, “You should be ashamed of yourself! Couldn’t you see he was trying to leave?” although his voice comes out sounding slightly more similar to a yelp. He tugs on Yuri’s sleeve, making sure not to actually touch him where he’s bruised, and says, “We’ll be going now! Goodbye!”

And they all but sprint out of the train station, leaving his landlord’s furious yells and the security guards’ frustrated voices behind.

Yuri only stops once they reach the station entrance above ground—he’s barely winded, despite the flight of stairs they’d just gone up, but Ashe wobbles and has to lean against a nearby vending machine to keep from falling entirely. It’s been a while since he’s had to run so quickly while winding through the throng of passersby, _and_ climb stairs. “Should be fine from here,” Yuri mutters.

“Really?” Ashe pants, glancing around—just in time to catch a tall, burly man slip into the gap between two buildings, and for a blonde woman, face hidden mostly behind her parasol, to saunter off and disappear into a crowd. _Isn’t it too dark out to still be carrying…_

“Ashe,” Yuri calls. “You… Are you okay? Wasn’t that your landlord?”

“Well… yeah,” Ashe says, trying to go for casual and not at all inconspicuous, but judging by the narrowed stare Yuri is giving him, he fails. “I was with a friend and I happened to… see that. Are _you_ okay, Yuri? It looks like he gave you a hard time.”

Yuri shakes his head. “It was nothing. He’s a bit of a sore loser, is all.”

 _A sore loser…_ The way they spoke made it sound like they were involved in some illicit deals. Yuri seemed like he’d had the upper hand, but Ashe can’t be sure about that. “Either way, he should be busy with the guards down there right now,” Ashe muses, “so at least he can’t chase after you. Um, sorry about him, by the way. He’s… not a great person.”

“He’s an asshole,” Yuri says, looking amused. “I’ll say it for you. He’s been upping rent, hasn’t he?”

“Wh—How do you know about that?”

“He just looks like the sort of person to do shit like that.” Yuri shrugs. “Still, as long as he’s down there, I can’t get a train back to my place. He might even send the guards after _me._ ”

Ashe frowns. They’d turned the story on his landlord quickly enough, but if the man manages to convince the guards otherwise, they might be on the lookout for Yuri to question as well. “Then…” He brightens. “How about you come over for a bit? I was just about to have dinner.”

Yuri stares at him. “What?”

“Dinner,” Ashe repeats. “I made tonkatsu.”

Yuri’s focus visibly wavers at the word. “T… Tonkatsu, huh,” he mutters, looking around as if this conversation can’t be overheard. “Oh, well, haha, _sheesh,_ if you insist…”

Ashe mentally pumps his fist in the air. “You don’t have plans or anything, do you?” he asks, though it’s mostly out of courtesy by this point—he’s already taking the path back to his apartment, damn Yuri’s imaginary plans. “Or do you have friends around? We can invite them over too, if you want.”

“Uh, no, nope. No one’s here.”

“Really? But—”

“I’m by myself, sparrow,” Yuri reassures, a little more insistently, and Ashe’s plans to ask about the people he’d just seen on the street evaporate into nothing at Yuri’s last word. Yuri obviously notices, because he raises both an eyebrow and the ends of his lips. “What? Don’t like it?”

“Sp—Uh—I—”

“I can always just call you by name, if you want.” Yuri grins. “But I think you might like something else…”

“No, no, my name is fine!” Ashe hurries to say, though by how Yuri’s snickering at him, he doubts he’s made any real impact. “It’s just, uh. You never called me by a nickname before. And ‘Ashe’ isn’t really a name that _calls_ for nicknames, either…” It’s quick and easy to pronounce, unlike a certain someone whose name everyone first pronounces as “Linheart,” but it also has little potential to make a nickname out of.

 _Sparrow,_ on the other hand…

“Hmm. Just _Ashe_ is boring, though,” Yuri remarks, falling into step beside Ashe. He’s shorter, Ashe realizes, perhaps several days late. The height difference is barely noticeable, but it’s there. “I’ll think up something nice for you. Just give me a little time.”

Ashe huffs out a laugh. “Okay, you do that.” If that meant Yuri would stick around a few more days, Ashe would let him call him anything.

Back at his apartment, Ashe lets Yuri enjoy the food for about five minutes—then, when Ashe is sure Yuri is at least now fairly comfortable enough that he won’t run off immediately, he clears his throat and speaks. “Um, about a while ago.”

Yuri pauses, chopsticks halfway to his mouth.

“What was that all about anyway? You…” Ashe frowns. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I’m really curious, and that _was_ my landlord.”

With a sigh, Yuri lets his hand drop back down to rest on the table. “It was a job. He was a client. Does that make sense?”

“Did you… scam him, or something?”

“Oh, you heard that part?” Yuri mutters.

“I also saw…” Ashe makes a vague gesture with his hand. “That night at the laundromat. You two were talking, and then…” _You drove off with him to some secondary location… I should probably stop saying ‘secondary location,’ huh… wait a minute._

If Yuri’s only relationship with his landlord is his job client, and they went to take it somewhere more “private…”

“You look like you realized something important,” Yuri dryly points out, taking another bite of his food. “You still want me to say it?”

“But—what did you do to make him act like that?” Ashe asks, leaning forward. “I mean, it sounded like _something_ went wrong, at least on his end…”

Yuri sighs. “How do I explain this… Fine, I’ll just come out and say it. He was causing trouble, so I cozied up to him, and when his guard was well and down, I blackmailed the guy out of his cash.” He lifts his shoulders in a what-can-you-do sort of way. “I won’t bore you with the details, but long story short, he’s a dissatisfied customer that _claims_ to have been cheated out of his money. Bold words for someone who cheats others out of _their_ money on the daily.”

Ashe blinks, very slowly. “So… he’s broke now?”

“You can certainly say that.”

“Huh.” Ashe leans back against his chair, taking a bite of tonkatsu and chewing thoughtfully. Only when Yuri starts shifting in his seat does Ashe remember he should probably respond. “Thank you?”

“What the—why are you _thanking me?_ ” Yuri barks out a laugh. “I just committed a crime. You should be reporting me instead. Aren’t you, like, a goody-two-shoes or something?”

“Just out of curiosity, does this mean you convinced him to lower rent prices?”

Yuri nods. “Wouldn’t have been a point in getting all his money if he was just gonna get it all back from innocents.”

Ashe smiles, his shoulders already feeling much lighter. “There. Thank you. Want seconds?”

Yuri looks down at his plate, then sighs. “Oh, what the hell… please, thanks.”

They talk about more mundane stuff—Yuri is far more conversational now, actually volunteering information about himself this time. Ashe learns a variety of things, such as that Yuri had stopped growing when he was 19 years old and he’s been bitter about it since, and that he wears heels around a lot just to look taller than he actually is. (He’s not wearing any now, though, because he had anticipated he’d be running today. Not specifically running through a crowd of people and then up a long flight of stairs, but running.) He also likes playing MMORPGs in his free time, which he unfortunately doesn’t have a lot of.

Ashe still makes sure to steer clear of Yuri’s line of work, though—he’s not naive enough to believe he knows everything there is to know about his job, but he also doesn’t want to take chances and ask for more than Yuri might want to give. Yuri cheating unfairly rich people out of their money is enough for Ashe—for now, anyway.

It’s when Yuri stands up to leave, murmuring about overstaying his welcome, that his wrist hits the edge of the table and he bites out a curse. Ashe pauses in the middle of collecting the plates. “It still hurts?” he asks, though he already knows the answer.

Yuri shakes his head. “Whatever. It’ll heal.”

“You’ve had them since last week,” Ashe retorts, setting the dirty plates by the sink and turning back to face Yuri, doing his best to look as disapproving as possible. “Don’t tell me you didn’t even get them treated?”

“‘Get them treated?’” Yuri snorts. “By _who,_ exactly?”

“I—I don’t know,” Ashe mutters. He supposes going to the doctor for some bruises might be a bit much, but doesn’t Yuri at least have someone to help him with things like these? Actually, why can’t Yuri just treat them himself? “Well, do you want me to help you?”

Yuri blinks. “What?”

The last time Ashe had seen the bruises, they’d been dark green, just barely purple. “Let me see your arm,” he says, stepping towards the dining table. Yuri doesn’t move, and deciding this is as good as permission as he’ll get, Ashe reaches towards his sleeve—

Yuri’s arm jerks forward then abruptly halts, as if aborting the reflexive motion, before he pulls away entirely. The movement is sharp enough to cut. “Don’t,” he snaps, tension radiating off of him.

“O-Oh.” Ashe’s hand hovers above thin air, the space Yuri’s arm had just been in. If Yuri hadn’t stopped himself, would he have… hurt Ashe? “I’m sorry. I…”

“Thanks for the food,” Yuri says, tone bland. He tugs the ends of his sleeves down, though they’re already long enough to reach his palms, and grabs his jacket off the coat rack. “Your cooking’s as good as ever, huh? Well, I gotta go. The commotion at the station should have died down by now. Bye, Ashe.”

“Yuri—”

But the door is already swinging shut.

6

Linhardt wrinkles his nose at the menu. “You don’t have alcohol?”

“This is a café,” Ashe reminds him.

“No excuse not to sell alcohol.”

“Med school changed you,” Ashe sighs.

Linhardt closes the menu and hands it back to him. “We’ve established that. Also, just get me something sweet and liable to give me diabetes. If I can’t drown my sorrows in alcohol, I’ll have to settle for sugar.”

Ashe writes _strawberry smoothie_ on the notepad, to make things easier for him. “Any reason you couldn’t have just gone to a bar?”

“Because then I’d be supporting some stranger’s business when I could be doing _you,_ a _friend,_ a whole load of good,” Linhardt says, as if he’s donating millions of yen to their café rather than ordering a single, non-alcoholic drink. “Also, the nearest bar’s too far away.”

Ashe supposes he should have expected that.

It’s been over a week since Yuri’s visit, and Ashe hasn’t seen nor heard from him since then. It’s more than a little worrying, considering what little Ashe knows about his occupation is that it’s dangerous enough for him to be targeted by clients and injured by who-knows-who, but Yuri hadn’t given him any personal details, like phone number or email or literally anything Ashe could use to contact him. The only thing he _does_ know is that Yuri has to take the train to get back to wherever he lives, but even then that could have been just another lie.

Ashe sighs, staring down at the smoothie he had made by pure instinct and reflex by now. Why does Yuri have to be like this? Gone and back and gone again? Ashe could have sworn the Yuri he knew wouldn’t do this. Well, then again, that Yuri was from over ten years ago, and that Yuri was also infamous for skipping school for long periods of time, so maybe that hasn’t really changed either.

“What’s with the long face?” Linhardt asks, once Ashe returns with his order. “More importantly, what is _this?_ You took my diabetes comment more seriously than I expected.”

“Strawberry smoothie.” Often paired with their strawberry pancakes. That reminds him, Ashe hasn’t seen Byleth the elementary school teacher yet. Now is around his usual time of arrival. Maybe he’s waiting for his sister? “That’ll be ¥320.”

“I don’t even have a ¥20 coin right now,” Linhardt mumbles. “And answer my question. You look miserable, you know.”

“Do I?” Ashe sighs again. “I’ll tell you about it later, I gotta work. Stay and wait ‘til I get off my shift, okay?”

“That’ll be one smoothie every 30 minutes, then,” Ashe hears Linhardt mutter behind him.

The café is busier tonight, though that may be because it’s raining hard outside—people without umbrellas keep ducking in to take shelter and order hot drinks to warm up, which means the tables have been filling up at a ridiculous rate. Bernadetta has to keep taking 20-second breaks to keep her hands from shaking, and Marianne’s eyebags look like they’re getting deeper and darker with every customer she has to speak to.

Ashe resists the urge to sigh a third time as he approaches another table. At least this means a slightly bigger paycheck soon. And by the rate Linhardt is going through their strawberries, it looks like he might be getting closer to donating a million yen after all.

It’s 10:30 in the evening when the café finally winds down and they can catch a break—once the others are done, Ashe slumps down face-first on the counter, uncaring of how many germs there must be. Almost all tables are still full, but most people are just talking to each other now rather than ordering. “Sit down a while with your friend,” Dedue suggests, replacing an empty plate in the display case. “It’s still raining. More people are bound to visit.”

“Ugh…” Ashe pats Dedue’s arm, then drags himself over to collapse onto the chair opposite Linhardt. “Sorry to keep you waiting…”

Linhardt sips his third smoothie of the night. “It’s fine. Your smoothies are actually… not bad.”

“Thanks. Really, thanks.”

“It’s just that someone at school tried to make one themselves—it was 4 in the morning, so I couldn’t really stop them—and then the kitchen exploded, so I’ve been wary of smoothies ever since,” Linhardt says, all in one go. Ashe has no idea how he does that. “But I didn’t come here to tell you about how life is a nightmare. So? What’s up with you?”

Ashe scratches his neck. Where to even begin? Should he start by telling Linhardt when he met Yuri? Honestly, the only reason he hadn’t told Caspar and Linhardt when they were in high school was because he had a feeling both of them wouldn’t believe him. Even now, Ashe doubts Linhardt would listen to everything Ashe wants to say without making a comment about how this all seems a bit too shady to be getting involved in.

But… might as well try, Ashe supposes. “There’s this guy.”

Linhardt automatically leans forward. “Oh, _do_ go on.”

“We were friends when we were around ten years old. Then he transferred schools, and I never heard from him again until a few weeks ago.”

Linhardt slowly leans backward. “Oh. Hmm.”

“And from what little I’ve learned about him, his job apparently involves extorting money out of the rich. Through… dangerous means.”

Linhardt nods. “Oh. Wow.”

“‘Wow?’ Anything else?” Ashe prompts.

“This all seems a bit too shady to be getting involved in,” Linhardt says, as if reciting directly from the script of Ashe’s internal monologue. “Are you sure this friend of yours isn’t a member of the yakuza or something?”

“Well, I…” The only thing Ashe really knows about yakuza members is that there’s a ritual involving cutting their pinky finger off or whatever, and Yuri had all his fingers intact. Then again, that’s not the most concrete evidence to give, and it’s possible not all yakuza groups do that to their members anyway. “I don’t know,” he eventually says.

Linhardt taps his chin. “Isn’t it strange that you two would magically meet up again after 15 years of being apart? Quite the coincidence, if you ask me. He might even be targeting _you_ next, Ashe, even if you’re not a millionaire or anything. Trusting friends make the easiest targets.”

Ashe bristles. “That’s not—Yuri wouldn’t—”

“And how do you know everything he’s telling you—or even showing you, for that matter—is the truth anyway?” Linhardt tilts his head. “15 years is a long time. People change.” _People go their separate ways._

“But—” _But Yuri came back,_ Ashe wants to say. _But Yuri came back, and maybe this time he can stay, because even after all this time he should still see me as a friend, right? He came back, and doesn’t that mean something, doesn’t that mean there’s still a chance we can go back to how we were before? He came back when I thought he never would, and doesn’t that mean something, can’t it_ mean _something?_

He drops his gaze down to the wood grains on the table. “I… You’re right,” Ashe eventually admits. His voice sounds far away, even to himself. “I don’t know anything about him. I thought I did, but…”

“I don’t mean to say that he isn’t the same person from before,” Linhardt says, voice the tiniest bit gentler. “But… it might be wise to be cautious around him all the same.”

“Yeah, if I even see him again after all this,” Ashe grumbles. “He hasn’t returned since I invited him for dinner and pissed him off.”

“How on earth does that even happen? I would be ecstatic to eat your cooking for free.”

Ashe shrugs. “Stuff happened. I was stupid.”

“Oh, well.” Linhardt sips his drink, and air rattles noisily up the straw. “Will getting me a new smoothie help you feel better? That’ll be my fourth one now, right?”

With another sigh, Ashe stands up from his seat and takes the empty glass. He might as well get back to work now that Linhardt knows most of the details. “Are you actually planning to get diabetes from these?”

Linhardt waves a dismissive hand. “It’s fruit, it’s harmless.”

Ashe is pretty sure a med school student would know it isn’t, but he decides against pointing that out. Just as he’s about to deliver the glass back to the counter and get to work on yet another strawberry murder, the bell jingles with the arrival of a new customer. “Welcome,” Ashe greets, turning around—and feeling himself smile almost involuntarily. “Ah! Byleth, isn’t it?”

Byleth raises a hand in greeting. “Hello.” He’s soaked to the bone, dripping rainwater all over the floor and trailing mud behind him. Ashe tries not to wince. “Um, are there any open tables…?”

Shit. Ashe quickly scours the café, but pretty much every table is still occupied. Maybe Byleth could share? Ashe’s gaze latches onto the nearest empty seat, and has to bite back a laugh when he sees exactly which chair it is. “No empty ones, but do you mind sharing with someone else? There’s an extra chair by that table.”

“It’s fine,” Byleth says, already hurrying over towards the chair. He only looks up to meet the eyes of the other person when he’s already seated. “Um… good evening. Sorry. Um, there aren’t any empty tables left, is it alright if…?”

Linhardt blinks blankly back at him. His gaze slowly slides over to Ashe, who smiles his best innocent, “no way could I possibly be involved in this” manner, then slowly slides back to Byleth. “Oh, yes,” he finally says, after what felt like five solid seconds of silence, “of course. Please.” Not so subtly, he reaches around himself and begins to arrange his messy hair into something slightly more presentable.

Byleth’s mouth quirks up in a small, barely-there smile. “Thank you.” And then he promptly shucks off his coat and undoes the first two buttons on his blouse, soaked transparent by the rain.

Linhardt’s eyebrows shoot up in an obvious mix of clear interest and mild panic.

Right on time a group of friends stand up and leave their table after paying their bill. Ashe’s first thought is to tell Byleth, who’s distracted fishing out some papers from his bag, but at the same time he has a feeling Linhardt would kill him on sight. “Will it be the usual today?” Ashe asks instead, trying not to think of how having strawberry pancakes at 10 in the evening does not sound good for anyone involved.

Byleth nods, looking distracted—there are test papers in his hands, and both red and black ink has run down the paper from the rain, turning whatever was written on the pages an illegible mess. “Please, thank you,” he mumbles, looking utterly miserable.

“That looks bad,” Ashe notes, bending a little to look down at the papers, close enough that he can see the tips of Byleth’s ears turn red. _Uh… oops._ “Will you be alright?”

“I don’t know,” Byleth sighs. He glances up at Linhardt, then gingerly lays the papers on the table. “Some of these were already graded and recorded, but the rest…”

Linhardt clears his throat. “You can freeze wet papers to salvage them.”

Just like that, Byleth’s head snaps up from the papers to Linhardt. “Really? How does that work?”

Linhardt doesn’t have to smile in that self-satisfied way of his for Ashe to know he’s doing it internally. “It’s a long process, but a friend at school had to do something similar once, so I know how.” Then, after a meaningful smile, “I can show you, if you’d like.”

“Okay,” Byleth instantly agrees, fast enough that Ashe _knows_ he hadn’t caught on to Linhardt’s second meaning. “So you need a freezer, right?” To Ashe, he asks, “Can I use yours? I-I mean—only if it’s alright. I’ll pay extra.” He’s practically pleading by this point, normally deadbeat eyes big and wide.

“Uhh. You don’t have one at home?”

Byleth deflates. “I do, but my sister is busy, and I don’t have an umbrella. Maybe I should just give the rest of my students a perfect grade…”

Ashe sure wishes that could have happened to him when he was in elementary school. “I mean, why not? Maybe you don’t need to freeze—”

Behind Byleth’s back, Linhardt gives him a murderous look.

“—maybe you could stay here a while and wait for the rain to stop,” Ashe backtracks. Byleth blinks, but looks thoughtful. “I’ll get you the pancakes right away, alright?” And he rushes off, deciding he might as well let Linhardt have some alone time with the guy.

When he returns, he walks a little slower, getting just close enough to hear their conversation. “So you’re a teacher?” Linhardt’s saying, elbow propped up on the table and chin resting on the edge of his palm. His long hair is draped artfully across his shoulder—Ashe is almost entirely sure he had arranged it to look exactly like that when Byleth hadn’t been paying attention—and smiles prettily. “That’s cute. What do you teach?”

“Art, mostly.” Byleth is barely even looking at him, too absorbed with the rest of the items in his bag. Ashe can’t see much from where he is, but he catches a hot pink notebook with a Pretty Cure cover design.

Linhardt frowns, leaning just slightly closer. Byleth doesn’t look away from his bag. “I’m guessing you teach over at Garreg Mach Academy, then? That’s the nearest school here, isn’t it?”

Byleth nods, glancing up at Linhardt for the briefest of seconds before looking back down. Ashe can almost feel Linhardt simmering with frustration. “My sister too.”

Ashe takes the quick pause to deposit the pancakes, as well as Linhardt’s fourth smoothie, on the table. “Thank you for waiting.”

Byleth visibly brightens. “Thank you. Ah, your restroom has a hand dryer, doesn’t it? Um…” He gives Linhardt an unsure look, then awkwardly gestures at his bag and the objects cluttered all around it, filling up nearly half the table. “Is it okay… Could you…”

“Oh, fine,” Linhardt sighs, leaning back against his seat. When Byleth still looks a little lost, he adds, “It’s alright, I’ll watch them,” and Byleth spares him a grateful nod before fleeing to the restroom.

Linhardt immediately buries his face in his hands. “Hopeless.”

“There, there.” Ashe pats his back.

“I have never seen someone so attractive and so disinterested at the same time. Why must this happen? Why can’t he just bring me home and teach me a lesson!”

“Uh…” It’s amazing just how casually Linhardt says things like that. The last time he’d been like this had been with Ferdinand, some political science major from Ashe and Caspar’s college, and Linhardt hadn’t been able to shut up about wanting to do a various number of things to the man for _months._ “Maybe he’s just, you know. Preoccupied.”

Linhardt glares out at Ashe from between his fingers. “No, I can tell when someone isn’t interested. That, or this man is just _extremely_ determined to dry his papers. Che! When he could be getting wet somewhere else—”

Ashe steps aside and lets Byleth slide back in his seat, though not before he casts a look over at the nearby empty table. “Thank you. Sorry for the trouble.”

“It was nothing,” Linhardt grumbles, already looking much more like the Linhardt Ashe knows. Then he mutters “gah” under his breath, and reaches behind himself once more to carelessly pull out the ribbon keeping his hair in a half-bun—long green locks fall down to his shoulders, back to being a complete, frazzled mess in a second. With his hair still slightly damp from the storm, he looks like a grumpy street cat that got rained on.

Ashe means to offer Byleth help with moving his things to a different table, but when he catches Byleth openly staring at how Linhardt’s hair curls just slightly up at the ends, he wisely decides to scurry back to the counter, safe by Dedue’s side.

“Hmm,” is all Dedue has to offer.

“Sorry, I had to watch that,” Ashe apologizes, though he’s probably only around half-apologetic. “You gotta admit, it’s pretty entertaining.”

Dedue looks as if he’s torn between looking disapproving and amused. “I worry about this. The café wasn’t built with… B-grade rom-com setting in mind.”

Ashe laughs, because okay, that’s actually as accurate as describing this meeting can get. He falls silent when he sees something move outside the café walls, though—a person drawing their thin jacket around themselves, hunkering down but still obviously drenched by the rain. They’re thin and just around the same height as Ashe, maybe a bit shorter—then they’re gone, fading into the rest of the passersby outside.

 _Yuri…_ Is he out there right now? Is he waiting the rain out in a café too, or sitting at home and staring out his rain-slick window? It’s almost embarrassing how badly Ashe wants to know how he is, what he’s doing. Yuri, after all, seemed to have no problem leaving Ashe a second time—if he’d even had any problems the first time around.

The thought hurts more than Ashe wants it to. He heads to the backroom and busies himself with washing some dishes, letting the cold water run down his hands and drown out the rest of the words in his head.

Ashe returns to the counter just in time to catch Linhardt’s eye. “Oh, there. Bill, please,” he calls, raising his empty glass with a little smile. Exactly how does he finish ¥320 smoothies so quickly? Well, not Ashe’s problem—that’s ¥1,280 in total for them, anyway.

Byleth raises his hand. “Mine as well, please.”

Ashe suppresses a sigh, doubles back, and gets separate bills. Linhardt retrieves a sleek black credit card that Ashe is fairly sure does not belong to him, but Byleth takes several minutes longer to rummage around in his pitifully thin wallet. “Um,” he manages, “sorry—give me a minute—”

“It’s okay if the bills are wet,” Ashe reassures. Beside them, Linhardt yawns, looking ready to fall asleep already now that he seems to have given up on his Byleth-conquest.

“That’s not it,” Byleth murmurs, looking increasingly panicked, “I don’t—” And then he cuts himself off there, as if refusing to speak the truth would keep it out of existence.

Ashe takes a deep breath, exhales, and speaks. “You don’t have enough?” The pancakes cost around ¥700, and Byleth had never failed in paying the exact amount. He’s one of Ashe’s favorites for a reason—it means Ashe never has to mentally calculate change. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it,” he says, when he can tell Byleth is on the brink of a meltdown. Ashe mentally steels himself for his next words, and says, “I can pa—”

Linhardt tugs on the hem of Ashe’s sleeve. He could probably reach higher, but he’s also probably too lazy to lift his arm too much. “Just use my card.”

Ashe blinks. “Your… card?”

“My bad. My father’s card.” Linhardt gives the aforementioned card in Ashe’s hands a look. “I wasn’t lying about not having a ¥20 coin, but I did steal that off of him the last time I visited. He’s so rich, he still hasn’t noticed.”

“Oh, well…” Ashe glances over at Byleth, who looks torn between fishing around in his wallet further and staring at Linhardt… or rather, his credit card. “Are you sure?”

Linhardt snorts. “It’s ¥700. The asshole won’t die if he’s suddenly ¥700 poorer, will he?” _And if he does, good for me,_ Ashe can hear. Linhardt glances over at Byleth, then crosses his arms and pointedly looks away. “Well, that’s my one act of goodwill for the week, I suppose,” he mutters to himself.

“T—Thank you,” Byleth stammers, standing up and bowing at what looks like exactly 90 degrees, drawing the attention of the other customers. “Thank you very much! And you’ll even… the freezer…”

“The freezer?” Linhardt repeats, bewildered.

“You’ll show me how to dry these, right?” Byleth asks, sounding as if he just barely avoided stumbling over the words as he gestures to his papers.

Linhardt’s face goes through three different stages of confusion. “Oh. Right, I did… offer…”

Ashe clears his throat. “Ahem. I will… take my leave. Be right back.”

Once again, he escapes to the register with Linhardt’s card, feeling as if he might not have made the best decision introducing these two. Well, it’ll probably be fine if he just combines the prices into one bill.

Ashe doesn’t know what time it is when he returns to his apartment, only that it’s probably after 12am and the rain is still going strong. He trudges through the doorway, kicks off his muddied shoes, and only has enough energy to shrug his drenched jacket off before just about collapsing onto his floor with an exhausted groan.

The rest of his clothes are soaked, too… he should probably take a shower and change before getting in bed, even though his muscles are pleading for rest. He pushes himself up, trying to stretch the ache out of his arms and legs, and makes his way towards the bathroom. Idly he wonders how (or what) Linhardt and Byleth are doing now—they’d gone to Byleth’s place together using Linhardt’s umbrella, after Linhardt had been blissfully oblivious to his new, wet-cat appeal that Byleth apparently liked more than what he’d tried to put on…

Ashe freezes. Turns, slowly, to face his kitchen.

His apartment is small, just the right size to feel more cozy rather than cramped. It also means any sounds apart from the ones he makes are all too easy to hear.

The kitchen door is shut. Ashe distinctly remembers leaving that open before he left for work this morning—aside from his bedroom, he likes leaving most doors in the apartment open, because then he doesn’t have to worry about any apartment ghosts randomly slamming them shut. And now it’s closed.

If whoever is in there doesn’t already have a weapon, there are plenty of kitchen knives to choose from inside.

On his other side is his bedroom—Ashe ducks in, pulls open the bottom-most drawer of his dresser, and grabs the first thing he sees before he silently returns to the short hallway. The kitchen door, with the scratch marks his cat had left the last time Christophe brought her to visit on it, with the hastily-scrawled recipe for teriyaki salmon taped on it so Ashe would remember to buy the fish next time he went to the grocery, has never looked more threatening than right now.

With a deep breath, Ashe twists the doorknob open, then thrusts the dagger out before him. “Don’t move!” Whoever’s inside must have already heard him entering earlier, and probably heard all his earlier movements and deduced he went for a weapon, but he can at least do his best to be mildly threatening all the same.

Nothing. Ashe peers inside, willing his hands to keep from shaking—and stares, feeling his jaw drop, when all he sees is Yuri curled up on the floor, back pressed up against his counter.

Ashe lets his arms drop down to his sides, the dagger dangling uselessly in one hand. “Wh—Yuri?”

Yuri groans and massages his temple. “Thought I was pretty quiet myself.”

“How did you…” Ashe frowns. Yuri probably picked the lock open on the door—the apartment’s too cheap for key cards and the like—and he obviously remembered which floor and which unit number Ashe lives in from last time. Trust him to have impeccable memory of something like that. “What are you doing here? If you were hungry, you could have just, I don’t know, texted…”

“ _Hungry?_ ” Yuri repeats, incredulous.

Ashe shrugs. “I mean… you’re in the kitchen for a reason, right?” Though there’s none of Ashe’s refrigerated food anywhere in sight, even some wrappers or containers. “Unless you just wanted to see me?”

The joke falls flat. Ashe had been expecting it to. After a second of silence where Yuri just stares at Ashe in disbelief, he shakes his head and looks away. “I’m… taking a break here,” he mutters, which has to be the vaguest explanation to anything Ashe has ever received in his life. “I’ll be gone in the morning, alright? I didn’t and I won’t take anything. I just needed a roof.”

“O-Oh. Yeah, it’s… it’s pouring out, I guess…”

In his head, Ashe’s last remaining brain cell slaps him. _Way to state the obvious! Next you’ll point out that it’s some unholy time of morning and he should sleep on the couch if he wants to get comfortable!_ Which Ashe had sort of been planning to offer, because really, it’s only polite. Even if Yuri just _asking_ to stay the night would have been also more polite than him just straight up breaking and entering the apartment, Ashe still knows his manners.

Ashe sets Dimitri’s dagger atop the counter, stepping forward to check the fridge. He’s still dead-tired, the adrenaline from earlier fading quickly, but falling asleep right after saying hello is no way to treat a guest. “Are you hungry? Do you want anything?”

“What? Uh, no?”

“You sure? What about tea?”

“I’m fine,” Yuri sighs, shifting forward—and then hissing in pain, which effectively drags Ashe’s attention away from food. Neither of them had bothered turning on the light, but now with the faint glow from the fridge, Ashe can see—

Ashe drops to his knees. “You—You’re hurt!” _Oh, again with stating the obvious!_

“No, I’m not,” Yuri grumbles, pulling his right leg closer to himself and shrouding it back in shadows, but Ashe had already seen the deep wound close enough to know that wouldn’t be healing itself like some old bruises. There’s a puddle of blood on his kitchen floor, for goodness’ sake—how hadn’t he noticed earlier? “Quit looking all concerned,” Yuri snaps, but there’s hardly any force behind his words. “I’m fine. It doesn’t hurt that much.”

Ashe stands up. “Don’t be difficult. Stay here, alright?” Then, without waiting for an answer he doesn’t need, Ashe hurries out of the kitchen. Where had he left the first-aid kit?

It takes some rummaging and running around the blessedly small apartment, but eventually he finds it tucked in one of the cabinets in the bathroom, and Ashe rushes back to the kitchen. Thankfully, Yuri is still sitting on the floor where he left him, squinting at his leg as if he hadn’t noticed his own injury. “It really isn’t—Ashe,” Yuri says, brows scrunching in clear irritation, “it’s not a big deal. Put that thing back.”

Ashe lifts up the piece of gauze. “What, this? You scared of it? Yuri, just let me help.”

“You—”

“You’re _hurt,_ ” Ashe finally snaps back, “and I don’t know why you don’t want me to help you when I’m _right here_ with a _first-aid kit,_ so why don’t you just think of it as me trying to keep you from getting blood all over my kitchen floor?”

Yuri grits his teeth, the end of his lip curled up until he almost looks like a wild, injured animal desperately baring its fangs. “I thought I told you before,” he bites out, voice cold: “Don’t touch me.”

Frustration rises like a rolling wave in Ashe’s chest, but he turns away and tries to steady his breathing before he raises his voice. Shouting won’t get him anywhere. “Yuri,” he says, and he’s a bit surprised by how firm his voice comes out sounding. Then again, he’s the second-eldest in the family.

“Ashe,” Yuri returns, the tiniest hint of mocking in his tone.

“Do you trust me?”

Yuri doesn’t even take a second. “That’s a stupid question.”

“And that’s not an answer.” Ashe leans back, letting his hands drop; Yuri eyes the gauze almost warily, as if that’s more dangerous than the dagger Ashe had just been holding. “Okay. Fine. Look, just… I’ll leave these here.”

A pause. “What?”

“These.” Ashe drops the piece of gauze back into the first-aid kit. “You can fix yourself up if you want to. Or not. I recommend you do, though. Actually, I’m not letting you leave until you _do_ use these. You’re not walking out there with an injury like that.”

Yuri scowls, but there’s more confusion in his expression than even he can hide. “Why are you…”

“I’m—” Ashe crosses his arms, feeling more than a bit childish. “I’m worried about you! It’s like you keep getting hurt but you won’t let anyone _help_ you when you need it. You’re breaking into my apartment just to bleed out in my kitchen when you could have asked for my help? Or—” Would going to the hospital be out of the question, if Yuri’s trying to hide his identity? “Or, just, I don’t know! But aren’t we friends?”

Yuri visibly winces, turning away to glare at some spot on the floor. “That’s…”

“Fine,” Ashe concedes, “we _were_ friends. But I still… You can’t expect me to just let you keep going with your leg like that. I don’t think any decent person would. I care about you, okay?”

Silence, again. Moonlight streams in from the open window, dusting the top of Yuri’s lavender hair like a halo.

Then slowly, cautiously, as if ready to break into a run if the situation calls for it, Yuri reaches for the gauze. Ashe says nothing, just watches expectantly—and Yuri says nothing in turn, keeping one eye on Ashe and the other on his leg as he presses the material against his wound.

Ashe isn’t sure what time it is when he nods off, only that he eventually wakes up just minutes before his usual lunchtime (which is to say, 2 in the afternoon). The first-aid kit sits innocently in front of him, its contents perfectly arranged, and the floor just about sparkles from the sunlight. Yuri’s nowhere to be seen.

Ashe stands up, stretching out the kinks in his limbs—he’s still dressed in his rain-soaked clothes, which probably isn’t good for him, but he’s too tired to care. Nothing else is out of place in the kitchen. If it weren’t for the bloodied gauze he finds in the trash bin, he’d almost be willing to believe last night hadn’t happened at all, because everything with Yuri always feels like a dream dangling just out of reach.

The weekend is spent in a daze. Ashe buys the groceries (half-expecting to see Yuri when he goes down the milk aisle), goes to the laundromat (half-waiting for Yuri to stroll inside with his landlord), and visits the café (definitely glancing out the windows every few minutes to see if Yuri will walk by), but none of these really process in Ashe’s head as actual, real events that took place until someone takes the seat across him.

His mouth’s already forming Yuri’s name until he realizes exactly who he’s looking at. “Oh. It’s you.”

“What do you mean, it’s me?” Linhardt wrinkles his nose. “Of course I’m still in the area. Did you think I’d hop back to campus without even giving a proper goodbye first?”

“You say that like you’re getting on a plane instead of just a half-hour train ride.”

“Details.” Linhardt flaps his hand in the air. “Anyway, you look even more terrible than you did yesterday. Did something happen? Or perhaps, did nothing happen?”

 _Both,_ Ashe wants to say, but just thinking about telling Linhardt everything that happened, and the subsequent comments that he’s sure are to follow, are already tiring him out. “Not really,” Ashe decides. “The shift yesterday was just exhausting. What happened after you left with Byleth, by the way?”

It’s a sloppy conversation change; thankfully, Linhardt takes it with a satisfied grin. “Well, wouldn’t you like to know!”

Ashe doesn’t, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“I really was absolutely clueless when I went home with him. I figured he actually just wanted me to freeze-dry his papers and whatnot, so I used his freezer and loaded up an article on his phone to follow the rest of the instructions.” Linhardt leans back, his smile growing more content with each word. “And then as I was about to leave, he went all puppy eyes on me and asked, ‘Oh, already?’ and I said, ‘Were you expecting anything else?’ and then I realized what he was implying and I, ahem. Jumped him.”

“Jumped him,” Ashe repeats hollowly.

“There are many terms I can use for what I did. That’s one of the safer ones to use in a public place like this.” Linhardt nods to himself, like this is something to be proud of. Ashe supposes it is, at least for him. “He’s very cute outside the bedroom. _Inside,_ well… hmm… how can I describe it?”

“You don’t need to,” Ashe reassures him. With a sigh, he slumps forward on the table, absently stirring his iced water with a small spoon. “That’s great. It looks like you, uh… got what you wanted after all.”

“Yes, he told me he fell for me the moment I undid my hair.” Linhardt frowns. “Alright, well, not in those words exactly, but close to that. I forgot. It was in the heat of the moment, and his mouth had been somewhere else right before and after that, so—”

Ashe lets out a tiny, pitiful wail. “Okay! Okay, you can stop, I get it!” Really, when he had directed Byleth to the empty chair across Linhardt last night, he hadn’t expected something like _this_ to happen immediately afterwards! How is it that everyone seems to move so fast _except_ for him? It doesn’t help that he had harbored tiny crushes on both people involved at some point, and now they’re seeing _each other._ Because of _him._

Linhardt snickers, like the terrible person he is. “So now you know. We exchanged numbers. Absolutely can’t wait to call him ‘Professor’ at some point. Alright, alright, I’ll stop,” he says, just before Ashe would have thrown water across his face. “I’m here again because my train’s still in a few hours and I’ve got time to kill. Surely you’ve got more stories to tell me?”

“Ugh…” His night was nowhere near the level of success Linhardt’s was. Is it even something Ashe can talk about without sounding like an idiot for not calling the police at the time? “Well, I saw him again. The guy I told you about.”

“Mhm.”

“And, um… well, he doesn’t like me.” Ashe winces. “ _Really_ doesn’t like me. Or at least he doesn’t trust me.”

Linhardt taps his chin. “You two only just met up again recently. I wouldn’t expect him to trust you so quickly again, especially since he… what was his job? Something dangerous, wasn’t it?” At Ashe’s nod, Linhardt hums thoughtfully. “If his job is dangerous, maybe staying away from you is his own idea of protecting you, too.”

Ashe feels his grip on the spoon slacken. He hadn’t even realized he’d still been holding it. “What?”

“If _you_ worked a dangerous job,” Linhardt says, “and it might mean people close to you get hurt because of it, you’d want to avoid getting close to others, right? Your enemies might target your friends to get to you. That’s a classic in every form of media ever.” Linhardt sighs. “I’m almost disappointed you didn’t think of it right away. That’s one of your favorite tropes.”

“I… Well, that’s a _trope,_ ” Ashe argues. “I wouldn’t apply it to real life! And… that doesn’t make sense,” he mumbles, “because as far as I can tell, Yuri really, genuinely doesn’t like me.”

“That’s what you think.”

“That’s what I’m _observing._ ”

“Maybe that’s what he’s letting you see,” Linhardt counters, and Ashe has to admit he had been expecting that. “If you see him again, try some nice, open, direct communication. It worked well last time, didn’t it?”

Ashe silently shakes his head. He may be on friendly terms with Dimitri, but that doesn’t mean the other man looks his way every time he visits the café to talk to Dedue.

Linhardt looks put out, but is undeterred. “Whatever. Try it. Byleth and I did plenty of that last night. I learned quite a lot about what he likes—”

“You know what, why don’t you just go to the station early.”

The rest of the day passes in a blur—Ashe tries staying up late that night, mindlessly listening to random Spotify playlists, but he falls dead asleep after the app autoplays a string of soothing classical music. Sunday goes by much the same, although Ashe does spend a good few minutes staring lovingly at a photo of Meatloaf, Caspar’s cat, leaping several feet off the ground so it can scrabble at Linhardt’s face.

It’s at night while Ashe is going through his tattered old cookbook that the doorbell rings. He frowns—someone at work would have texted him if they were coming over. Is it his landlord? He hopes not—he’s been anticipating an eviction notice ever since the train station incident. “Who is it?”

No response. Ashe sighs, leaves the cookbook on the counter, and gets as far as the entryway before he nearly stumbles back in shock. “Yuri!”

Yuri toes off his shoes and arranges them neatly next to Ashe’s. “What?”

“I appreciate the doorbell, but couldn’t you have waited a little outside?”

“I did,” Yuri says, furrowing his brows. “And you took forever, so I let myself in. Pardon the intrusion,” he adds, half-sarcastically.

Ashe very nearly asks Yuri why he’s here, before figuring it doesn’t matter—if Yuri is here of his own will this time, without having been forced into it because of any injuries, then Yuri will probably tell him why later on. “Well… just in time,” Ashe says, turning around to head back to the kitchen. “I was just about to make dinner. Stay a while?”

“Uh. What?”

“Dinner.”

“Aren’t you gonna ask me—”

Ashe raises a hand, and Yuri surprisingly falls silent. “Dinner,” Ashe repeats, emphatically. “How do you feel about teriyaki salmon? I have enough for oyakodon too, though.” When no answer comes, he reluctantly turns back to face Yuri, who’s still standing by the entryway. “Hello?”

“Oh.” Yuri blinks, shakes his head, and steps forward. “You’re asking me? It’s your dinner.”

“Our,” Ashe corrects. “I was having trouble deciding anyway.” Then, when Yuri _still_ doesn’t move, “Come on. Salmon or chicken?”

Another pause, but Yuri finally walks closer, steps soundless on the floor. “The oyakodon, please,” he mutters. “Thanks.”

Yuri’s silent as Ashe cooks, and though he does help set the table, he doesn’t do much else aside from sit perfectly still at the dining table, staring blankly ahead of him. It’s only when Ashe sets the bowls down and murmurs “thank you for the meal” does Yuri echo him, pick up the chopsticks, and suddenly say, “Sorry for being a dick.”

Ashe looks up from his food. “Wh—huh?”

“What do you mean, _huh,_ I just apologized,” Yuri grumbles, already starting to shovel rice in his mouth like he hasn’t eaten in days. At that thought, Ashe gives what he can see of Yuri’s wrists a hard look, and tries not to frown at how bone-thin they are. “I was pissed and bleeding out in a kitchen and my first instinct was to drive you away. But you were just trying to help, and…”

He shrugs, picking at the chicken. “I shouldn’t have been an ass,” Yuri mutters, staring fixedly down at the table. “So, sorry, and thanks. There.”

Ashe lets the silence drag on a little longer, more to give himself time to assess his cooking than anything, before he takes pity on how Yuri looks like he’s getting more and more uncomfortable by the second and speaks. “You really went here just to apologize for that?”

Yuri looks tempted to throw his chopsticks in the air. “Well, the night kind of ended on a shitty note, so yeah!”

“It’s fine, Yuri.” Ashe shakes his head. “I got frustrated too, but… I don’t even really know what you’re involved in. How you got hurt. What you do.” _Who you are._ “So, whatever. I’m just glad you look better now. Your leg’s okay, at least?” he asks, though he doesn’t really need to—Yuri was walking fine, without a noticeable limp.

Yuri still looks bothered, but he nods. “It’s not that bad. Just bled a lot.”

“That… Yuri, that sounds pretty bad.”

“Eh,” Yuri says, like blood loss is a perfectly normal, daily occurrence in his life. And, well, based off what Ashe knows of him, he supposes that’s entirely possible. “I guess more than an apology, though, I owe you an explanation.”

Ashe hesitates to meet his eyes. “You don’t have to,” he says, but even he can tell how curious he sounds.

“No, but you do want it,” Yuri says, rolling his eyes. Ashe can’t even deny that. “It’s simple. I was on a job, I got injured, it was raining, and this was the closest place at the time. So I broke in and hid in the kitchen, mostly ‘cause I couldn’t get any further.” He sighs. “I wasn’t counting on you hearing me. I was just gonna wait for both the rain and the bleeding to stop, then I’d get back to my own place.”

“But I found you,” Ashe whispers, mostly to himself. _Even when I shouldn’t have. Even when I wasn’t supposed to._

Yuri shifts in his seat. “Yeah. You did.”

“Yuri.” Ashe leans forward, forgetting for a moment that he was planning on respecting Yuri’s privacy. “When you transferred schools… did you actually? What happened back then?” _Who are you now?_

The silence is heavy enough to hold. Yuri rests his chin on his palm, not quite meeting Ashe’s eyes when he speaks again. “I dropped out.”

This, at least, doesn’t surprise Ashe as he suspects it would have years ago—it seemed a more plausible explanation, at least. When Ashe doesn’t react, Yuri gives him a curious look, then continues. “We didn’t have enough money to keep paying tuition. I got all the odd jobs I could get at the time. Got involved in a bunch of illegal business.”

“Illegal business?” The worst Ashe can think of is stealing—it’s easy, for kids like them, to go by unnoticed—which isn’t as bad as Yuri makes it sound.

Yuri’s expression doesn’t change. “First client, I didn’t care,” he starts. Ashe feels himself pause— _client?_ Yuri couldn’t have been more than eleven years old, the way he says it. What sort of eleven-year-old takes on clients? “He didn’t, either. I let him do whatever he wanted, and the extra cash I got, I used to take the train back home.”

Ashe almost knocks his glass of water over. “You—”

“Second guy,” Yuri keeps going, voice still perfectly flat, “made it hurt a little more. And the third one wanted me to love him. It got harder. Then it got easier. Then it was just nothing at all.” He falls quiet, chewing noiselessly for a while. “I know what you’re thinking. How could I have done that, how low did I sink, how shameful I must be.”

“I’m not—”

“I don’t care,” Yuri bites out. He sounds tired, but he’s looking at the table rather than at Ashe. “I did it. I’ll live with it. Besides, I found a better business opportunity after a while.”

“A better… opportunity?”

Yuri pulls down the sleeve of his jacket—dark lines of ink curve and curl along pale skin, forming into the shape of a scorpion that glares balefully back at Ashe. “Made a gang.”

“Oh,” Ashe says, not sure how else to respond. The seconds pass in silence Ashe doesn’t know how to fill. “That’s… nice,” he eventually settles, right before wanting to beat himself up.

“Sure is,” Yuri huffs, pulling his sleeve back down. He looks amused, at least. “There used to be more members when I started out, but they thinned down eventually ‘til only close friends stayed. So it’s more a friend group than anything by this point. Heh, like an interest club? Anyway, we’re not killers or hitmen or terrorists.” He munches on some chicken like this revelation is a completely normal discussion to have over dinner. “We steal from the rich. People who won’t miss the money. That’s pretty much it.”

That certainly sounds like something Yuri would do. Ridiculously enough, the first person that comes to mind when Ashe thinks of “rich people who won’t miss the money” is Linhardt. “So… my landlord…”

“Yeah. I let him fuck me, and then I fuck him over.” Yuri flicks his wrist, the chopsticks dancing across his fingers. “The process is complicated, so I won’t bore you with it, but it takes a lot of acting, and lying, and acting and lying, and then a little more than you expect. Sometimes clients never realize they’ve been cheated. Sometimes they do.”

The shouting match at the train station… Yuri must have realized it would evolve to that. Maybe that was why they’d been at the station in the first place, in a crowded area where someone was bound to step in and Yuri could twist the story to turn it on his landlord. “Then your leg…”

“Oh, yeah.” Yuri rolls his eyes. “Sometimes people have _bodyguards._ I stole their guns, but I couldn’t keep them away from knives. Whatever—I got the money in the end, and that’s what matters. Bit sloppy for my standards, though.”

“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Ashe blurts out. “Or—at least let me check on your leg. It’s only been a day, it can’t have healed that quickly. I’ll get the first-aid kit,” he says, and stands up to head to the bathroom before Yuri can call him back.

As soon as Ashe gets to the bathroom, he pushes the door shut behind him and leans against it, taking a deep breath and letting it out through his mouth. He repeats the process more times than he can count, uncaring if he takes too long to get back to the dining table—so now he knows what Yuri does for a living. Now he knows the boy he once saved from a swimming pool, the boy he walked through the gardens and the storage rooms with, the boy he was _best friends_ with, is the leader of a gang. Fifteen years, and this is where their lives led them—fifteen years after Yuri went his own separate way, and here he is again.

Fifteen years, and Ashe finally found him again.

Inhale, exhale. Ashe stares at the white bathroom tiles until his eyes sting with dryness. Inhale, exhale.

He opens the cabinet, retrieves the first-aid kit, and heads back to where Yuri is waiting.

“It’s fine, really,” Yuri mutters, but he lifts his pants leg up all the same when Ashe gives him a look. The wound is there, looking more or less closed and healing well—Yuri couldn’t have been in Ashe’s kitchen long when he’d been injured, then, if the cut is doing fine. “I did a good job cleaning it, eh?”

Ashe rolls his eyes. “If I hadn’t told you to do something about it, you would have bled out in my kitchen.”

“Hmm.” Yuri’s lips curl up in a grin. “I like it when you’re a little snappy, sparrow.” Then, without even giving Ashe a second or two to recover from Yuri sounding like _that,_ “Oh, no, you didn’t like sparrow last time, didn’t you? What do you want, then?”

“My name,” Ashe weakly insists.

Yuri, of course, ignores him. “Robin. Nah, that’s an actual person’s name. Mm… goldfinch? Nope, doesn’t flow well. Sheesh, you make nickname-giving a hard job.”

Ashe gives Yuri his best exhausted look.

“Okay, okay. So you want… chickadee?”

When Yuri pairs that with his lilting voice, and that grin, and those eyes, Ashe doesn’t think the name of a bird has ever sounded as provocative as it has now. “I don’t know what those look like,” Ashe says, though he’s fairly sure it’s some species of small bird, “but definitely not.” Slowly, and making sure Yuri’s paying attention, Ashe reaches for his leg, fingers hovering above the cut. “Can I…?”

Just like that, Yuri’s expression shutters closed like pulled window blinds—he turns away as if to hide this from Ashe, but Ashe sees it all the same. “I… Yeah, ‘course,” he says, the steadiness of his voice clearly forced. “Do whatever you want. I don’t care.”

Ashe pulls away and stands back up from his crouch. “Hmm. No, it’s fine. It looks like it’s healing well anyway.”

“What?”

“The wound?”

“No, I mean—why won’t you?” Yuri sounds frustrated, but he’s staring down at the floor rather than looking at Ashe. “I—what I said the other night—we _are_ friends. This isn’t—”

“Doesn’t mean you trust me.” Ashe gives Yuri as reassuring a smile as he can muster, but he wonders if he ends up grimacing instead. Yuri stares back, silent, too many emotions flickering in his eyes for Ashe to identify. “I don’t expect you to, especially now that I know what you’ve been doing since we were… apart. But please don’t feel indebted to me or anything either. I don’t want to do anything to hurt you, and I don’t want to do anything that you don’t want me to.”

Quiet—Yuri is still staring, still silent, and he looks almost lost, as if adrift at sea. _When was the last time anyone said that to him?_ “Okay,” Yuri murmurs, ducking his gaze away from Ashe again. In that moment, he reminds Ashe of how he’d been all those years ago, quiet, barely speaking, someone Ashe had wanted— _needed_ —to protect. “I… alright.”

Ashe gestures at the living room. “You can sleep on the couch, by the way. It’s not that comfortable, but I don’t have a guest room…”

“Uh, what?”

“Yeah, the apartment’s small, it’s only got enough for one bedroom and—”

“No, I mean—” Yuri breaks off in a laugh that Ashe can’t help but smile at. “You’re inviting me to stay the night? Again? What if I bleed on your couch instead?”

“Sounds like a real challenge to wash out.” Ashe shakes his head. “It’s up to you if you want to. But I have some old clothes that should fit, and an extra toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet.”

Yuri frowns, looking ready to argue again, before he glances over at the door—it takes a long second of what looks like quiet contemplation before Yuri finally nods. “Fine. I’ll leave in the morning—I still have a job in the area. But—I don’t know, at least let me do _something_ in return. I don’t like owing people favors.”

“I just said…” Ashe sighs. “Then how about you fix the table?”

Yuri fixes the table, washes the dishes, and packs the leftovers into little containers that fit snugly in the fridge. In the morning, he’s gone as promised, but when Ashe stumbles into the kitchen for a glass of water, he finds a plate of buttered toast and a cup of coffee next to it. He takes a tentative bite and a tentative sip—both are still warm, which means Yuri must have left just a few minutes ago.

Ashe still has some time left before he has to get to work—for the first time in a while, he sits atop the kitchen counter and eats breakfast, staring blankly at the wall in front of him.

7

“You’re going home together?” Dedue stares at him from over the counter, absently wiping his hands on his apron.

Ashe laughs as naturally as he can, though it comes out sounding more awkward than ever. “Uh… yeah. Yuri,” he calls, bending down and trying to reach the volume that’s still considered ‘speaking’ rather than ‘shouting,’ “wake up, it’s dinnertime.”

Slumped atop the café table, cheek smushed against the surface, Yuri groans and cracks his eyes open. Ashe grins down at him—it’s rare for him to see Yuri so defenseless like this, especially since Ashe has never seen him asleep before. Though it isn’t as if his face is permanently set to be stern and serious, there’s always a wall up that obscures his emotions from the passing eye. “Ashe?” Yuri mutters.

“Yeah. You sure slept like the dead.”

“Slept—” Yuri shoots up in a sitting position. His back cracks in what sounds like several different places at once. “I fell _asleep?_ ”

“For four hours,” Ashe informs him.

Yuri shakes his head. “You’re kidding.” But when he looks over at the table of the man he’d been spying on, his previously-occupied seat is empty—along with pretty much every other chair in the café. “Oh, fuck.”

“Come on, let’s go home.” Ashe hands Yuri his coat, and Yuri shrugs it on, the action looking mostly reflexive—he still has a bewildered expression on his face. “You can get back to tailing the guy tomorrow, can’t you?”

“Ugh. I guess.” Yuri massages his forehead. “Can’t believe I fell asleep on the job…”

They walk out once Ashe waves bye to Dedue, and a cool night breeze hits their faces. “That’s because you’ve been awake for over 40 hours,” Ashe admonishes. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t look like the guy did anything. Just really wanted some apple pie. Unless that’s cause for concern?”

“Hey, you never know. He’s my mark for a reason. What if he was… was…” Yuri trails off. “I don’t know. Researching the components of apple pie.”

“Well, it’s apple, and pie.”

“I would think _you_ of all people should know the components of apple pie best.”

When they get back up to Ashe’s apartment, Yuri flops on the couch bonelessly, evidently still worn out—he probably needs another ten four-hour naps to get his energy back up. “What’s for dinner?”

“Honey soy sauce chicken.” Ashe heads over to the kitchen. “It’ll be quick—just let me heat it up in the oven.” He doesn’t think he’s cooked this for Yuri yet, but he’s rapidly running out of different recipes in both his cookbook and his long list of bookmarked articles on his computer. If it’s just for himself, he usually makes something really quick and forces the food to last for several meals, but Yuri hasn’t gotten him the same breakfast once so far, and Ashe doesn’t want to lose in their little competition.

 _Competition…_ Ashe snorts to himself as he sets up the oven. Really, it’s just Yuri coming over to stay the night at Ashe’s couch nearly everyday for the past few weeks because of his current job, and sleeping here is more convenient and cost-efficient than catching a train back and forth all the time. Honestly, Ashe wasn’t expecting Yuri to take to it so easily. But when he kept coming back after the first (or second?) night, Ashe wasn’t about to just turn him away for no reason.

So Ashe makes him dinner, and Yuri washes the dishes and makes him breakfast the next day. Sometimes he even takes the laundry out if Ashe had forgotten to. Over time, it became routine enough that Ashe learned to expect Yuri letting himself in (literally) whenever it was around dinnertime, and Yuri started leaving little notes next to his breakfasts too. They were just short “good morning”s at first, but they’ve since evolved to nonsense like “good morning, blackbird, did you know the average fast food patron eats 12 pube hairs in a year? do NOT step foot in a mcdonald’s ever again,” but nonsense Ashe reads and smiles at all the same.

More often than not, Ashe forces himself to get up earlier than usual too, just to see if he can catch Yuri before he leaves, but the apartment is always empty no matter what time he wakes. It’s in those hours of the morning, where the sunrays are just starting to seep into the rooms, that Ashe feels loneliest.

“Ashe, my superb fairy-wren,” Yuri drawls, just as Ashe places the dishes on the already-set dining table, “your bookshelf, how do I say this… it’s very empty.”

“E-books are free,” Ashe says, pretending his heart doesn’t bounce up for a moment hearing Yuri call him _his._ “And what kind of bird even is that?”

“It’s a very cute one. Very small, very blue.” Yuri slides his long, thin fingers across the spines on the shelf before pulling one book out, the title unidentifiable from where Ashe is sitting. “Oh… Oh, _wow._ Huh… so this is what you’re into?”

“What?” Ashe peers closer at the cover design, then launches himself off his chair with a little scream. “Wait! T-That’s—That’s, uh, that’s from a friend! I mean, for a friend! Um, both!”

Yuri cracks the book open and starts cackling. “It’s _signed._ ”

Ashe grabs the erotica novel Dimitri had given him forever ago and throws it behind the couch. He usually wouldn’t treat books with such violence, but this is a special case, and his face is burning up far too hot for him to think of a more peaceful method. Really, the book should be thankful he didn’t punt it out of the window entirely. “Why—Why don’t we just sit down and eat!”

“Imagine this… I’m you, I’m walking up to a porn author with a copy of their book, and I say hey! I really _enjoyed_ this! Can you sign it for me, pretty please—”

Ashe buries his face in his hands. “It was a _gift._ ”

Yuri grins, but thankfully sits down in his usual place across Ashe at the table. “I’m a little jealous someone knew you well enough to think you’d like that sort of book. That person can’t have been _only_ a friend, can they?”

That particular disaster is really the last thing Ashe wants Yuri to know about. “I-It was… He…” Now he’s just glad Felix hadn’t given him any gifts, because that’s probably even _more_ embarrassing. “We didn’t last long, and that’s all you need to know. Now eat—you’re still too thin.”

“Ehh. The thinner I am, the more hiding places I have,” Yuri says, but he digs in all the same. By how much vigor Yuri gets every time he stays for dinner, Ashe has a feeling it’s because Yuri doesn’t get to have much meals outside of these nights. “But speaking of, you don’t really talk about your love life, do you? Or lack of one, anyway.”

“Probably because there isn’t much to say.” Ashe can already tell where this conversation is going. His first thought is to turn it on Yuri, but decides against that at the last minute—it doesn’t sound like a topic Yuri would want to talk about, anyway. “I had all of two relationships when I was in college. Both… not so great.”

“ _Two?_ In _college?_ ” Yuri huffs around his mouthful of chicken. “That’s a little underwhelming. Anyone _now,_ though?”

Ashe gives him a look. “No?”

“Damn. Why not? You work in a café with a cute uniform. I bet a customer or two was interested in you at _some_ point.”

Byleth instantly comes to mind, and Ashe tries to bury that memory, along with all other associated ones, in his head. “Yeah, well… he sort of, uh. Got stolen away.” _Cute uniform,_ though? It’s really just the typical white blouse and black pants, but if that’s what Yuri wants… no, no, Ashe can’t have his thoughts sliding down that particular slope either.

Yuri almost chokes on his food. “Say _what?_ ”

The story of Byleth isn’t nearly as awkward to talk about as Dimitri and Felix, but just as Ashe is about to mention one certain rainy day, the doorbell rings. Ashe frowns and checks his phone—no texts from Dedue or anyone else at work, and it’s not like they’d have a reason to visit so late. “Might be the landlord,” he mutters, glancing across the table at Yuri, who’s perfectly still in his seat. “Just a minute.”

“Wait,” Yuri says, worry tingeing his voice, “what if—but—”

“It’ll be fine, Yuri,” Ashe says, standing up and pushing his chair back. “I’ll be back in a sec. Go ahead and eat.” Then, without waiting for a response, he heads for the door and unlatches the chain. Not for the first time, he wishes he had a peephole. “Hello, who is—”

A hand shoots out to grip Ashe’s wrist. “Don’t move.”

Ashe freezes in place.

The man pushes the door the rest of the way open and steps inside. In his other hand is a gun he slowly, deliberately raises into Ashe’s line of sight, and then he presses its barrel to his chest. “Listen very closely,” he says—his voice is low and gravelly, and already Ashe can hear the threat laced in the words. “Do exactly as I say, and no one gets hurt.”

“W… Wh… What are you—”

“You may not know it, but the man you let inside your house is a dangerous criminal. The Savage Mockingbird.” The man steps inside, closing the door soundlessly behind him, and for one absurd moment all Ashe can think of is how he’s probably not going to take his shoes off at the entryway. “Lead me to him, and I promise you safety.”

 _Yuri._ Ashe should’ve known. No one else was at the café when they had left, but Ashe hadn’t exactly been looking over his shoulder to check if anyone was following them. And Yuri had fallen asleep, too—this person must have taken that as his chance to catch Yuri with his guard down. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ashe tries, speaking as slowly as possible. If he can just stall for time… “No one’s here. I live alone.”

The man jabs his chest with the gun, and Ashe has to keep himself from falling backwards—he has never been so acutely aware of how one twitch of a finger could lead straight to his death, here in his own apartment. “Do not lie.”

“Sir, I don’t know what you want, please just leave—”

“If you insist on getting in my way,” the man murmurs, voice cold, “I will have to get rid of you.”

For several long seconds, Ashe stands silently in place, trying desperately not to shake.

Then the man grabs his shoulder and twists him around—Ashe nearly stumbles from the force. He doesn’t even get to breathe before the gun is pressed up against his back this time, right between his shoulder blades. “Inside,” the man growls, grip tightening on Ashe’s shoulder until it hurts. “ _Slowly._ ”

If Ashe tries to say or do anything else to give Yuri more time, he’s just going to get a bullet in his back. With a single, shallow nod, Ashe takes a tentative step forward, and another, and another—the man steps in time with him, ensuring only one pair of footfalls is audible. A trained bodyguard, or… a hitman?

The walk to the dining table has never felt so long. When they finally arrive, after almost a full minute when it normally takes him five seconds, Ashe almost closes his eyes and looks away—but Yuri’s seat is empty. The table is set for two, but the chair is unoccupied, and Yuri is nowhere to be seen.

Relief floods Ashe like a tidal wave. “Sir—”

The man digs the gun against him hard enough that Ashe topples forward, falling hard to his knees on the floor—and then he doesn’t even have time to panic before he feels cold metal against the back of his head. “Bring me to him.”

“P-Please,” Ashe stammers, fear twisting around his heart like a boa constrictor, “I don’t—I don’t know—please, don’t—”

“Fine.” The gun twitches minutely against Ashe’s head, as if the man is adjusting his grip. “You leave me no choice.”

A _click,_ and then—

It happens too fast for Ashe to follow—one moment the gun is there, hard and cold and so terribly impersonal, and then it isn’t. The man falls on his side with a shout, the sound of metal clattering to the floor following quickly, and when Ashe turns around it’s to see Yuri there, pinning the man to the ground despite his smaller stature. The man opens his mouth, probably to say something, but Yuri, stone-faced, doesn’t bother to give him the luxury of speaking—he only plunges a knife into the man’s throat, as if to shut him up in the quickest way possible.

Blood spurts out like a fountain. It splatters across Yuri’s face, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t close his eyes, just buries the knife as deep as it can go into the man’s throat until Ashe hears the crunch of bone. Only when the man stops gurgling does Yuri stand.

So now there’s a dead body bleeding out on Ashe’s floor, and vaguely he hopes the blood doesn’t seep down to the ceiling of the unit below his.

“Ashe—” Yuri tosses the knife to the side and moves closer, hands coming up then stopping jerkily, as if in an aborted motion to touch Ashe’s face. “You’re alright? You’re not hurt anywhere?”

“I—” But Ashe can’t take his eyes off the corpse, the unseeing eyes, the sliced throat, the blood, the blood, the _blood—_

“Ashe. Ashe.” Yuri’s hands suddenly reach out to hold onto Ashe’s wrists. It isn’t skin on skin—Ashe’s wearing long sleeves—but physical contact at all from Yuri is enough to shock Ashe out of anything. “My little dove,” Yuri sighs, so quietly that even in the silent apartment, Ashe almost doesn’t catch it. “Tell me. Are you hurt?”

Ashe squeezes his eyes shut and takes several deep breaths. “N… No, I—I’m fine.” He’s seen people die before. Now isn’t any different.

“Okay. Alright. Thank fuck.” Yuri turns away, dropping his hands, and Ashe misses the steadiness of his grip almost immediately. “I thought I—fuck. Okay. This guy—” He crouches down beside the body, his hands skimming across the man’s clothes until Yuri retrieves a thin wallet. “He works for my target. Either a hitman or a bodyguard, doesn’t matter. Asshole must’ve followed us from the café.”

His mouth tightens in a hard line, and Ashe manages to take a few steps forward without collapsing. “It’s not your fault,” he says, softly. “Don’t blame yourself, Yuri.”

“But I—” Yuri cuts himself off with a growl, running a hand through his hair. “Listen, it’s impossible that there’s only one of these guys in the area. I’ll get someone to clean this mess up, but you have to come with me, or you’re going to be in danger if any more come here looking for their buddy.”

“What—Where are we going?”

Yuri doesn’t look at him when he answers. “My place.”

It isn’t too late that the trains have stopped running, thankfully. Ashe sits on a nearby bench, watching the lights flash by and listening to the rumbling of the train on its tracks. There aren’t many people around after rush hour, so the only other sounds are the announcements overhead and the muted murmur of commuters far away from them.

“Hey.” Yuri nudges his shoulder. Ashe turns to look, trying not to be too surprised at the casual touch, and blinks stupidly down at the canned tea Yuri gives him. “It’s still hot,” Yuri says. “I mean, obviously. I bought it, like, two seconds ago.”

Ashe laughs shakily—he pops the can open and takes a grateful sip, holding onto the drink with both hands to warm his cold palms. “Thank you.”

“Yeah.” A pause. “You… You’re okay, right?”

“He didn’t hurt me.”

“You know what I mean.”

Ashe sighs, blowing a stray strand of hair out of his face. “I’ve seen people die before, Yuri. It’s just been a while, and this… caught me off-guard. I was hoping I’d never have to see anything like it again, really.”

“You… saw people die?”

“When I was a kid.” Ashe had never told Yuri about it before, had he? “My parents died when I was around nine, so it was just me and my younger siblings.”

Ashe doesn’t have to turn and look to know Yuri’s brow is furrowed in confusion. “But I remember… your dad? And your older brother?”

“Lonato adopted us. Before that, we lived on the streets. I stole for a living.” Ashe faces Yuri now, and almost laughs at how wide his eyes have gotten. “So if you were wondering why I didn’t report you for screwing over my landlord, or telling me all about your criminal past and all… now you know why. I know I can’t compare, because I haven’t needed to steal in years. But… we were the same, once. That’s why.”

Yuri says nothing. Ahead of them, a train rumbles to a stop, its doors sliding open with a hiss. Ashe stands, smiling wearily down at Yuri. “This is ours, right?”

“Oh… yeah.” Yuri gets to his feet. He hadn’t bought a drink for himself, Ashe notices.

The travel time is longer than expected, reaching just under an hour—Ashe nods off on Yuri’s shoulder more than once, always slipping into sleep for a few minutes before he remembers where they are and who might be after them, and he shoots back into full alertness. Yuri is silent, neither pushing Ashe off nor shifting to help him be more comfortable.

When they finally get off at their stop, Yuri leads the way to his place—even with his shorter legs Yuri walks fast enough that Ashe struggles to keep up—and they head down a dark, seedy street that has Ashe jumping at every noise. Several twisting alleyways later, Yuri opens the door for Ashe into a cramped, rundown house tucked away in the shadows—one side of the roof has crumbled in on itself, and it looks like it’s on the brink of falling completely apart.

“Pardon the intrusion,” Ashe murmurs anyway, even if the place can barely be called a house anymore. Yuri follows behind him, and Ashe watches as he fixes five different locks on the door.

“Sorry ‘bout the mess. It’s been a while since I came back here.” Yuri heads inside, and Ashe trails after him—the house is small, with only the entryway, a bedroom, and a kitchen. It isn’t as messy as it is dusty and dark. “I… don’t have a couch, or a guest room,” Yuri mutters, glancing at Ashe from the corner of his eye, “so you can take the bed.”

Ashe frowns. “What? It’s fine. I’ll just sleep on the floor.” It’s been a while since he’s had to do that, but it’s not a big deal. “You can take the bed. It’s your house.”

“No. I’m keeping watch outside.”

“You—” Ashe almost stumbles on a loose floorboard. “You’re what?”

“In case the guy’s got people around in these parts. I need to keep watch.” Yuri sighs. “Five locks on a door don’t really end up mattering when someone heavy enough can crash through these walls no problem. Just sleep, Ashe. I’ll wake you up tomorrow.”

He’s already turning back around, heading towards a window as if he means to climb out of it, and Ashe has to bodily restrain himself from grabbing Yuri’s wrist and pulling him back. “Yuri,” Ashe calls, incapable of caring about the desperation in his voice, “please—stay with me. In the room. You—You can keep watch there if you want, but I—please don’t go out there.” He pauses, breathes, steadies his voice before he stutters again. “For both your safety and mine.”

“Ashe—”

“ _Please._ ”

Yuri stares at him a moment longer, then sighs and shakes his head. “Fine. Go wash up or whatever. The bathroom’s in the bedroom.”

There aren’t any extra toothbrushes, so Ashe has to use his finger, and Yuri’s old clothes are a bit too tight and far too short in some parts, but Ashe doesn’t have much of a choice. When he returns to the bedroom, trying to tug the pajama pants to reach below his ankles, Yuri is sitting on the edge of his bed, staring out the grimy window. “Are you really going to stay up all night?” Ashe asks, settling down beside him.

Yuri shrugs. “I have to.”

“You’ve gotten four hours of sleep after being awake for ten times that length.”

“Just sleep,” Yuri repeats. With obviously forced cheer, “What, do you want me to sleep with you?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Ashe responds, not really thinking about it—when no reply comes, he turns to look at Yuri, and almost laughs at the pink he can see dusting over his cheeks. “It’s your bed, after all. Might as well share, right?”

They exchange “goodnight”s, Yuri flicks off the lights, and Ashe curls up on one end of the bed while Yuri sits on the other, staring fixedly at the room door. The mattress is pitifully thin, and just lying on it for a few minutes has already begun to make Ashe’s back hurt, but Ashe is just glad he has a mattress at all. Outside are all sorts of sounds he doesn’t hear as often as he does up on the tenth floor of the apartment—dogs barking, the screech of motorcycles, arguments loud enough that he can hear every word.

Loud, heavy footfalls. Voices, audible but unintelligible. Doors creaking open. A _crash,_ somewhere in the distance, and a _bang_ that makes Ashe’s heart rattle in his chest.

Ashe sighs, burying his face in his hands. He’s safe here, they both are—with this being Yuri’s territory, he doubts there aren’t any gang members nearby that are on the watch as well. But all he can think about is the gun that had been so _cold_ against the back of his head, and the knowledge that if Yuri had been the one to answer the door—if Ashe hadn’t stalled for time as he did—

The bed suddenly dips, and Ashe turns around to see Yuri already beginning to nod off, his head drooping to his left. “Yuri,” Ashe whispers, so as not to startle him—“aren’t you tired? You should sleep too.”

“Mmn.” Yuri straightens, rubbing his eyes. “I’m fine.”

“Come on. Just for an hour.” Though Ashe has a feeling a gunfight wouldn’t wake Yuri up the instant he falls asleep, much less an internal clock.

“Don’t tempt me, nightingale,” Yuri says, his voice petering out in a yawn that almost has Ashe sleepy just hearing it. “How are _you_ not sleepy? Do you want me to sing you to sleep, little lark?”

How is Yuri still able to think up different bird species while half-asleep? “Why do you know so many birds?”

“I like birds. Especially the small ones. Y’know, they’re fat, and cute, and you think they’re harmless right up until they get in your face…” He yawns again, and this time Ashe takes the opportunity to very gently tug down at his shirt without directly touching him. Yuri submits easily, lying down on the bed with his eyes already nearly closed. “Ugh. I shouldn’t be doing this.”

Ashe huffs. “What? Sleeping?”

“Last time I slept… so, a while ago… you almost got shot.” Yuri seems to wake up a little more at his own words, and he props himself up on his elbow to meet Ashe’s eyes. “I… I’m sorry.”

Ashe sits up. “What for?”

“You almost got shot,” Yuri repeats. “Because of me.”

“That wasn’t—it’s not your fault,” Ashe says, feeling as if they’ve already had this conversation, or at least this specific set of dialogue. “I told you this already. Don’t blame yourself.”

Yuri’s silent again, dropping his gaze down to the bedsheets. The seconds pass in silence, and just as Ashe is starting to suspect Yuri fell asleep, he speaks again. “Did I ever tell you about my first love?”

The topic is so unexpected that Ashe can’t even respond for a moment. “What?”

“Guess not. It’s not the sort of thing that really comes up, anyway.” Yuri sighs. “He… was blonde. Had green eyes. I don’t think you remember him, but I can’t ever forget him. You don’t forget your first love so easily, after all, right?” He laughs softly to himself, but there’s more sadness than mirth in the sound. “I didn’t know any better. I just wanted to touch his hands, his lips… I was eleven years old. I didn’t know any better.”

Ashe swallows. _Blonde, green-eyed…_ in his mind’s eye he can almost picture it exactly as he remembers it: 5 o’clock, sunlight sparkling off the waves of the swimming pool, a group of boys laughing as they pushed someone’s head down the water. “This person…”

“He tried to drown me for that,” Yuri murmurs. “So now you know why they did it. Why they held me underwater until I couldn’t breathe. I never told you their reason, did I? Because—all I could think about in that moment was that I deserved it.”

The voice rings out loud in Ashe’s ears— _Freak!_ “Yuri, you…”

“I saw you, you know.” Yuri looks up at him again at last, and Ashe has to keep himself from instinctively backing away at the look in Yuri’s eyes. “Standing by the entrance. We made eye contact, didn’t we? I remember that. I remember thinking, _oh, I’m saved._ ”

He averts his gaze once more. “And then you ran away.”

“T-That wasn’t—”

“I know.” Yuri shakes his head. “But—when that happened, I thought you left me—I thought you abandoned me and left me there to die. Looking back, it’s sort of funny, right? Dying by some kid’s hands in your school swimming pool because you liked boys and you didn’t know any better? What would it have said on my tombstone?”

Yuri’s voice is dark, his words dripping with malice just a touch shy of being tangible enough to burn through the bedsheets like poison. Then his expression softens, and when he speaks again, there’s a faint quality to his tone that Ashe recognizes but can’t put his finger on. “But when I fell in, and you came back… you dived in, and… I saw you for a moment, too. The way you looked, in the water, with the sunlight… It was like something from one of your storybooks. The ones you liked so much. The ones you read to me all the time.”

Ashe worries at his lower lip. “Yeah. I… I remember too.” Yuri’s eyes were open for the shortest of seconds when Ashe had dove underwater. Of course he remembers—how could he forget? “I didn’t know what color your eyes were then,” he mumbles. “In the water, everything was… it felt like it couldn’t be real. Like a dream.”

But now he knows they’re lavender, the same shade as his hair, the same shade as the lavender flowers they displayed in the café in June, just last month.

Yuri sits up, the movement so sudden that Ashe actually does fall back to lie on his back this time—like this, Yuri hovers above him, the moonlight casting one half of his face in shadow. “I never thanked you for saving me, did I?” he asks, though it doesn’t sound like he’s looking for an answer.

“Uh—” Ashe tries to sit up again, but his hand slips and he ends up brushing his fingers against Yuri’s wrist beside him, skin to skin. Ashe pulls back so sharply that he nearly topples off the bed altogether. “I-I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—”

“No,” Yuri’s breathing, “touch me. Do it.”

“Wha—”

Yuri’s hands fly out to cup Ashe’s face, and then Ashe doesn’t even get the rest of his question out before Yuri is pulling him close and pressing their lips together.

Every coherent thought tumbles out of Ashe’s head; his last remaining brain cell jumps ship. Up until now, his experience with kisses had been 1.) that single, awkward, close-mouthed one with Dimitri that had literally been too romantic to be true, and 2.) the multiple, rough, very-teethy ones with Felix that had ended up with Ashe tasting blood more than once. Not very good experiences, in short. Interesting, certainly, but not quite _ideal_ for the hopeless romantic buried somewhere inside him.

But Yuri is different—he kisses like he knows exactly what Ashe wants. He drags his tongue across Ashe’s lower lip, tilting his head to deepen the kiss, nipping just hard enough that Ashe gasps and lets Yuri lick at the inside of his cheek. Yuri adjusts until he’s effectively straddling Ashe on the bed, rolling his hips downwards at an excruciatingly slow pace that has Ashe’s entire body flushed and feverish and begging for more.

When Yuri pulls back, it’s only to give Ashe enough time for one single shallow breath, and then he’s diving back to slide their lips together again, which really only serves to make Ashe dizzier than ever. Without thinking, he bucks his hips upwards, chasing for friction just on the edge of his reach, and Yuri _moans_ in his mouth, arms twisting around Ashe’s neck and resting on his shoulders.

“Wait,” Ashe gasps out, just as he’s fairly sure he would have lost whatever semblance of self-control he still had, “wait, Yuri—what are you doing?” Gently, with barely any force behind the action, he pushes Yuri off of him to meet wide violet eyes.

Yuri’s lips are red and swollen and shiny with saliva— _Ashe’s_ saliva, he realizes with a start. “Don’t you want this?” he asks, sounding almost lost.

“ _What?_ ”

“You know.” Yuri shifts closer until he’s essentially sitting on Ashe’s thighs, which is not exactly the best possible position right now. “Me.”

“W-What are you—”

“I’ve noticed how you look at me. You aren’t subtle.” Yuri tilts his head to the side just slightly, loose strands of hair falling over his face. Ashe feels his own cheeks start heating up again—there are probably more important things to note, but all he can really think of is that he had almost certainly been subtle, thank you very much. “So… didn’t you like it? Don’t you like me?”

“I—I mean, o-of course I like you,” Ashe sputters, speaking as fast as possible before the embarrassment can overtake him, “but—but what about _you?_ You can’t go around kissing people who like you if you yourself don’t even…” He swallows, looks down, almost wrings his hands together before he realizes he’s still holding on to Yuri’s waist. “Don’t even like them back.”

A pause—a short one, but a pause Ashe notices all the same. Yuri’s staring at him, some emotion Ashe can’t name flickering across the shine of his eyes, there and gone in the next blink. “I…”

“You don’t owe me—this,” Ashe says, before Yuri can come up with another argument, “just because I helped you out over a decade ago. I mean, I’m just happy to even see you again. You don’t owe me anything! In fact, you don’t owe anyone anything. Your worth isn’t determined by what you give others. And I—I don’t want you.” He can barely meet Yuri’s eyes when he says it, and he regrets maintaining eye contact almost immediately—the faint light across Yuri’s face seems to dim at the words. “Not like this.”

For several long seconds, the only sounds come from outside—the stray dogs, the vehicles, the people. Yuri doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look at him, barely even breathes. For several long seconds, Ashe keeps his hold on Yuri, because letting go now would feel like a defeat.

“I—” Yuri swallows, gaze flicking up to look at Ashe for the briefest of seconds before he looks away again, sliding off Ashe’s lap. “I don’t know… I don’t…”

“It’s okay.” Ashe slowly, painfully, lets go. Yuri blinks down at where Ashe’s hands had been resting on his waist, as if the weight had been familiar enough to grow accustomed to. “It’s alright.”

“It’s not.”

“It’s okay,” Ashe repeats. Gently, again, he reaches out and nudges Yuri until he lies down, then throws the thin, scratchy blanket over him. “Sleep, Yuri. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

For once, Yuri doesn’t argue—he stares up at Ashe another moment longer, then turns to lie on his side, back facing Ashe, and curls into a small, tight ball.

Ashe sits there, watching Yuri’s shoulders rise and fall in time with his breathing a little longer, then inches to the other side of the bed and mirrors Yuri’s position. The night has never felt quite this cold.

In the morning, Yuri is gone. Ashe sits up, pushing the blanket off and blinking blearily at the sunlight streaming in from the window, then starts panicking almost instantly at the empty space beside him.

Thankfully, the panic doesn’t last long—just as Ashe is about to spring out of bed and start a frantic search around the area, the door opens. Yuri steps inside, dressed in a change of clothes and looking even more exhausted than he’d been the night before. “Morning,” Yuri mumbles, not looking at Ashe.

“O-Oh. Good morning.” Ashe’s nose wrinkles of its own accord. This smell… “Where did y—”

“Job’s done.”

“Eh…?”

Yuri pulls a knife out of the inside of his jacket and drops it on a table. Ashe vaguely registers the sharp shock of red on the blade and thinks, _oh, so that’s the smell._ “Job’s done,” Yuri says again, voice completely devoid of inflection. “Your apartment’s cleaned up too. You can go home now.”

Ashe slides off the bed, taking a cautious step closer. “What about you?”

“I don’t have business over there anymore. Why go back?”

The unspoken “For you?” hangs heavy in the room. Ashe, unequipped to deal with a conversation like this so early in the morning, can only look away and mutter, “Oh,” as if that contributes anything to the topic.

“You can get to the station from here, can’t you?” Yuri asks, tone still perfectly flat. “It’s not hard once you get to the main street.”

“I—yeah, I can—yeah.” _Why_ does he have to be so utterly terrible with words now? “Okay. Yeah. T… Thank you, Yuri. I mean it.”

Yuri turns away and says nothing for a long while. Then he steps aside, leaving the doorway open for Ashe, and Ashe follows the silent order to leave with haste.

The walk to the station is longer than Ashe had expected—he gets lost more than twice, and the confusing alleyways seem to have multiplied overnight—but somehow he makes it back in one piece. He catches a train back, squeezing in with the rest of the commuters, and checks the time—he’s already a few minutes late for work, and stopping by the apartment to change will probably mean he’ll be coming in at least a half hour later. Ashe tries not to wince; hopefully Dedue will understand.

Back at his apartment, Ashe dashes down the lobby as fast as he can, mashes the elevator buttons, and jumps out as soon as the doors slide open onto his floor. Then he halts in his tracks, because there’s a tall, muscled man standing outside his unit, leaning against a wall and… playing Tetris on his phone, from what Ashe can see. He isn’t a resident—Ashe has been living in the building for years, and this is the first time he’s seeing this guy.

_Or, wait… wasn’t it that one time…_

As soon as the man turns and sees Ashe, he straightens and slides past him to get into the elevator. Ashe ducks into the corridor and stares after him as the doors slide shut once more—the man still looks perfectly engrossed in his game.

Inside, the apartment is as clean as promised. There isn’t a hint of blood on the floor or in the air, and it almost feels as if the body hadn’t been there at all. Even the leftovers from last night’s dinner are neatly packed into various containers clearly taken from his cabinets, with the older ones that don’t close all the way tied with a neat purple ribbon. Ashe grabs one pack to eat for lunch later, changes into a clean uniform at the speed of light, then runs back out to wait for the elevator.

It takes him a moment to realize this is the first time in a while that he won’t be having breakfast and a morning note.

It’s a busy day at work. Ashe is only too glad for the distraction—he does his best to lose himself in the job as always, taking orders and making drinks and greeting customers. But there’s a cold, numb feeling at the back of his head and in the hollow of his chest that he can’t get rid of, and he can’t bring himself to smile as genuinely as usual to both customers and coworkers. Ashe is sure Dedue notices—nothing escapes his scrutiny—but he doesn’t bring it up, to Ashe’s relief.

Early in the night, during one of Ashe’s breaks, Caspar and Linhardt drop by. “Finals just ended, so I finally have some free time again,” Linhardt says, flopping onto the chair beside Ashe as soon as he walks in. “Should I get the strawberry again? Or are there any other smoothies?”

“I like the blueberry one,” Caspar muses, staring up at the menu display above the counter. Ashe is barely aware of what they’re saying. “But, ehh, let me think. How about pineapple?”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Hey! What’d pineapple ever do to you?”

“I’d rather not think about it,” Linhardt mutters with a grimace. The implication that something involving pineapple actually did happen at some point in his past is enough to get Ashe to lift his head from where he’d been resting it on the table. “Oh, good, you’re awake… why do you look like you’re at the brink of death?”

Ashe blinks blearily at the both of them. “‘Cause I am,” he mutters, and decides to leave it at that. “May I take your orders…”

“What? No, aren’t you on break right now?” Caspar squawks. Ashe furrows his brow—is he? He does vaguely remember messaging the group chat an hour back about only needing to last another half hour before he could rest, if only for a few minutes. “We’ll just ask someone else. Wait, but I haven’t even decided… blueberry or…”

Caspar ends up with pineapple just to spite Linhardt, and Linhardt gets strawberry again, which seems to be a sign that he’s become an addict. Mercedes smiles kindly at all of them and fetches Ashe a glass of cold water without him having to ask. “So, what’s up with you now?” Caspar asks, once their drinks arrive. “Lately it looks like your problems sort of just keep getting worse…”

Ashe sighs. “It’s just…” He knows they mean well, but he’s utterly exhausted from the unknown amount of hours he’d slept last night and from the grueling work today that everything with Yuri is just the cherry on top. “Nah, it’s nothing,” he mumbles. “Can you two just, like… talk about whatever. What’s going on at work? And school?”

He catches the look Caspar and Linhardt exchange, but they don’t argue. Good—anything to get Ashe’s mind off things, even for just a little while.

They both talk in jargon Ashe can barely understand, Caspar business and Linhardt medical—he does follow a story where Caspar’s client almost flung himself into a river “for the fun of it,” and how they had almost needed to bring in legal action over a missing tomato. Linhardt shares his “favorite” incidents at school, which mostly involve his classmates hurting themselves in a disturbingly wide variety of methods.

School, of course, leads to Linhardt waxing poetic about Byleth. Ashe tunes most of it out, as does Caspar, evident by how his eyes glaze over ten seconds in. Ashe has a feeling shy, quiet Byleth wouldn’t really be Caspar’s type anyway… what even is Caspar’s type? He’ll have to ask him about that later, whenever Ashe remembers to.

“He visits every now and then, it’s very cute,” Linhardt’s saying, absently mixing his drink with the straw. “Most of the time it’s because he made extra for lunch or dinner and wanted to give me some, though I think that’s just an excuse to get me alone somewhere on campus and—”

Caspar holds his hands up. “Whoa, you don’t have to finish that sentence. We all know what comes next.”

“But the _details—_ ”

“Aren’t needed.” Caspar shakes his head. “It’s kinda weird to see you so… in love, Lin. You were always saying you weren’t for that sort of stuff when we were younger… or right up until you met the guy, actually.”

Linhardt shrugs. “I wouldn’t call it love just yet. He’s just very endearing, and he provides both good food and sex, so it’s more like… an arrangement I am very much invested in.”

Caspar gives Ashe a world-weary look. “So, like, love.”

“It isn’t _like that._ ”

“Good food and sex! What else do you want? An emotional connection?” When Linhardt doesn’t respond right away, his usually-pale cheeks going a faint shade of red, Caspar snorts. “Oh, right, you _already got one._ I can’t think of a lamer way to get together than over… what was it? Freeze-drying paper?”

“It was very romantic,” Ashe chimes in. He’s still drained of energy, but embarrassing the unflappable Linhardt is an opportunity that doesn’t come around everyday. “I remember so well… when he did his best to look very pretty and attractive and the only time Byleth looked at him was when he gave up and went back to looking like an angry cat.”

Linhardt buries his face in his hands when Caspar and Ashe devolve into snickers. “Very funny, both of you. He told me himself he doesn’t care for people who are too uptight or snobbish, and that’s what he thought of me the first few minutes we met.”

“ _Aren’t_ you kinda uptight or snobbish, though?” Caspar asks, sounding genuinely confused.

“Yes,” Linhardt says without a hint of embarrassment for something he should probably be embarrassed about. “I think he meant prissy, since he doesn’t seem to mind when I say things other people usually get mad at me for. But then Byleth’s very strange, so who knows exactly what goes on in his head.”

Judging by the empty, blank-eyed stare Ashe always catches on Byleth whenever he’s at the café, Ashe wonders if anything goes on in that head at all, aside from maybe constant elevator music.

“Still, isn’t it interesting?” Linhardt looks up at the both of them, idly sipping his drink. “Two out of billions of people met at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Billions of different paths either of us could have taken, but we took the ones that led to each other. Whatever this is might not last, but I don’t think I would regret it.” He pauses, then gives Ashe a pointed look. “Isn’t it the same for you as well, Ashe?”

Judging by how Linhardt’s face twists in pain right afterwards and the alarmed look Caspar shoots him, Caspar just kicked Linhardt’s leg a bit too hard under the table.

Ashe looks away. “He took the path that led away from me years ago.”

“Ashe,” Caspar says, but he doesn’t get further than that. Ashe can’t blame him.

“I screwed up again,” Ashe says. He doesn’t feel like explaining everything that happened last night, and honestly, he doesn’t even know _how_ he screwed up, but it definitely feels like he sure did _something_ wrong. “It’s, like… it keeps happening. You know? Not just with Yuri right now. With everyone. Maybe I’m just destined to keep screwing up, and it’s just worse when it’s with him, because I was just getting used to being with him again after he left, and then…”

He trails off. _People go their separate ways_ —and maybe Yuri’s path had just intersected with Ashe’s a few times. Maybe Ashe should just let him go.

“Well, he’s back now, isn’t he? After 15 years, right?” Linhardt stares at him over his drink, stirring it slow and languid. “Are you going to let him leave again?”

“I’m home” is halfway out of Ashe’s mouth before he realizes he’s speaking to a dark, quiet, and empty apartment. It’s been a while since he’s had to turn the lights on himself—Yuri’s usually waiting for him at the kitchen, the table already set.

Just the thought of making dinner right now tires Ashe out more than he already is. He’s not hungry anyway, and really, he doesn’t want to eat dinner alone at the table, so he trudges into the bedroom and flops onto the bed with a sigh. He’s still dressed in work clothes and he hasn’t had a shower all day, but right now he can’t bring himself to even stand, much less move.

If Yuri were here, he’d probably say something like, _You stink, go shower or I’ll get you fast food with pube hair for breakfast tomorrow._ Which isn’t really something Ashe would feel threatened by, but he’d get up anyway, because Yuri’s said more than once that he likes it when Ashe’s hair gets all fluffy after a shower. Like the feathers of a bird, he’d described.

With excruciating effort, Ashe sits up on the bed—there’s no point in trying to get to sleep now, when he knows all he’s going to do is think about Yuri until the sun rises. Maybe a shower would help after all?

The water is freezing cold, and because Ashe hasn’t gotten around to asking about maintenance on his heater, he has no choice but to deal with it. He doesn’t do much actual washing, just sort of stands in the shower and stares blankly at the tiled wall until he zones back in and gets the soap. Even now, he can’t stop thinking about Yuri—his cold gaze earlier this morning, his distant eyes last night.

Last night…

Ashe blushes just thinking about it. Of course, he knows it probably wasn’t borne out of anything aside from the debt Yuri feels he owed Ashe, but—but caught in the heat of the moment, it had felt… good. Nice. More than good and nice. It felt like everything Ashe had wanted and more—the warmth of their bodies, the heat of Yuri’s mouth, the way he’d _moved_ against Ashe—

He stifles a small sound behind his palm as his other hand moves downwards. Maybe in some parallel universe where Yuri actually liked him, in a world where Yuri didn’t have to fear another person’s touch, something else could have happened—something _more_ could have happened. Maybe Ashe could have kissed him again and again, could have told Yuri all the things he couldn’t before, like how beautiful, how perfect he is—they could have taken their time, could have stripped each other down and… and…

The valley of yearning is too wide, too vast to possibly cover. Ashe wants to touch Yuri’s cheeks and wrist and neck and mouth, wants to hear Yuri speak in some breathy, breathless voice, whisper the names of birds so his breath flutters across Ashe’s skin like a flock of songbirds against the sky. He wants to tell Yuri—he wants and wants and _wants—_

Ashe screws his eyes shut, his humiliating moan echoing briefly in the bathroom. For a moment, all he can really do is lean heavily against the wall, breaths heavy and legs wobbling, and let the water wash his guilt away.

His room is as empty as he’d left it—Ashe isn’t sure why he’d been expecting anything different. He sits at the edge of the bed, absently toweling off his hair. If Yuri were here—

 _No, no, no._ Out of lack of things to do, Ashe stands up, draping the towel around his shoulders and glancing around the room, gaze landing on a drawer he must have left ajar some days ago. He heads over to push it shut, but hesitates at the last minute—isn’t this where he’d left Dimitri’s dagger in? Ashe doesn’t even remember where he left it after the encounter with Yuri that one night—

 _Hopeless,_ says a voice that sounds disturbingly similar to Linhardt in his head. Ashe has to agree. He pulls the drawer open, sighing at the disorganized mess of various memorabilia over the years—gifts from friends, mostly, that hold too much sentimental value to throw away, despite their uselessness. Ashe pulls everything out to spread across the floor, then starts slotting them back in neater: a dried-up calligraphy set from Linhardt, a neon pink turtle keychain from Annette, a pair of hand weights from Caspar.

His hand falters momentarily over a pile of books that had been tucked in the far end of the drawer—almost all the volumes are old and faded, pages cracked and yellowed from age. Where had he gotten these? The memories are teetering on the edge of remembrance, like remnants of a childhood dream—

 _Oh._ Ashe blinks. Gardens, storage rooms, every off-limits area the school could possibly have—he had read these books aloud in each one of them, sometimes loudly, sometimes under his breath.

He thumbs through the pages, peeling them apart from each other. Fantasy and adventure novels, mostly. A prince falling in love with a commoner. A knight whisking his lover away from a castle. The chosen hero restoring peace to the kingdom. Two thieves chasing after the same mark.

Ashe doesn’t even realize he’s crying until a tear lands on a tattered old bookmark that had once been a project in class—the colors have faded from both the paper and his memories. But he knows it’s the bookmark he used when he stood up from the rock he’d been sitting on in the garden, the bookmark he slipped into these pages when he’d said, “It’s okay, I’ll finish it for you when we get back to school.”

He’d been so _certain,_ so _sure_ that he’d see Yuri again, that the months of summer vacation would be just that—vacation. Then they would get back to school, and he would see Yuri again, and they’d get to finish the book together.

Ashe had gotten a day of absence instead. And then a week. And then a month. And then fifteen years. On a whim, he glances at his phone—it’s the first week of August, mere days before Yuri’s birthday again. Ashe is barely even surprised at this—it was June when they’d bumped in the grocery, something he remembers mostly because the lavenders are always in season in June. Has it already been two months since?

The memory of that day all those years ago rises, unbidden—the empty chair Yuri should have been sitting in, the empty garden and the empty hallways and the empty storage rooms. The infirmary. The uneaten cake. Ashe, sitting alone on the bleachers, sometime near sunset when Christophe came back to let him cry in his chest.

And now it’s the empty café table, the empty dining room, the empty couch. This book, still unread, still unfinished.

_He’s back now. Are you going to let him leave again?_

_He took the path that led away from me._

Ashe feels his grip tighten, almost involuntarily, on the book. The other half of its pages are untouched, its spine barely creased from reading and rereading like the rest of the books are.

_Or did we take the paths that led back to each other?_

On the bright, sunny morning of August 12, Ashe wakes up in a bit of a daze and thinking about breakfast. Only after he rubs the sleep out of his eyes does he remind himself that there is no breakfast, only another long day of work ahead of him—if not longer.

Ashe had half-expected today to be different, but it’s as normal a day as ever. Mercedes greets him a pleasant good morning. Marianne gently points out that the bags under his eyes could rival her own, a fact he doesn’t dispute. Bernadetta talks excitably about her new cross-stitching project. And Dedue, of course, is… well, Dedue. He mentions an idea for a new menu item that has Ashe scrambling to search for similar recipes online to make sure Dedue’s is one-of-a-kind and something worth advertising.

The Byleth twins drop by too, both looking exhausted—Ashe listens to them talk about the field trip they’d had to supervise today, about how one kid wandered off and almost got run over by the school bus and about how another kid had brought along an entire steak for lunch. They get their usuals, the sister goes through five cups of coffee while the brother finishes three entire smoothies, and they leave a generous tip that Ashe almost starts salivating over in front of the next set of customers.

It’s around 9pm, just as the evening crowd is beginning to thin out, that Dedue taps his shoulder. “Do you want to leave early tonight?”

“Eh—huh?”

“You’ve looked restless all day. As if anticipating something.” Dedue shrugs. “It wouldn’t be a problem. You’ve been working overtime for the past few days, anyway.”

“Oh.” Ashe looks up at Dedue, whose expression doesn’t change from his usual stern stare. It occurs to Ashe that if it hadn’t been for Dedue, Ashe wouldn’t be working in this café. Maybe Ashe wouldn’t even be living in the area, in fact—maybe he would have gone to work as an employee at a flower shop instead, to put that degree in botany to use. Or maybe he wouldn’t have a job at all.

Without thinking, he steps forward and wraps his arms around Dedue’s middle in a tight hug. He’s only tall enough for his face to reach the upper part of Dedue’s chest, but that’s enough for him. “Thanks, Dedue,” Ashe mumbles, willing the heat out of his eyes as best as he can. “It… means a lot.”

Dedue is silent, before gingerly returning the hug. “I… do not know what brought this on, but I’m glad. If you are this emotional over leaving work early…”

“It’s not that,” Ashe laughs, but he can’t bring himself to explain any further.

Ashe actively refuses to pay attention to literally anything except getting back to his apartment as fast as he can—once he’s inside, he pulls on the first jacket he sees, grabs the box in his fridge, then throws himself back into the elevator before the doors have even closed all the way. Thankfully, the train station isn’t as crowded as Ashe feared it might be, and he manages to make it onto a train and into an empty seat without jostling the box too much.

Sitting across him is a redhead woman around his age, tapping away at her phone and looking generally exhausted. She glances up only to see the box on Ashe’s lap, then slowly lifts her gaze to meet his eyes. Wordlessly, she lifts an eyebrow in a clear question.

Ashe smiles. “Uh… it’s a cake.”

“Yeah, I figured.” She looks at it again, but the box isn’t transparent plastic, so Ashe wonders what she’s trying to figure out. “Happy birthday?”

“I-It’s not mine! It’s for a friend.”

“Huh,” the woman says. “Okay.” Then she returns to her phone, typing away rapidly; Ashe hopes she’s not talking about some awkward stranger on Twitter.

Despite the fairly lengthy travel time, Ashe is too jittery to fall asleep—when he reaches his stop at around 10pm, he hops out and immediately feels out of his depth. There are barely any streetlights around in the area, and the few interspersed along the road do nothing to light the place up. Worse, it had been hard enough finding his way back to the station in the morning with the memory of its layout still fresh in his mind, and now it’s downright impossible to even remember more than a few vague landmarks in the darkness of night.

Something crashes down an alleyway, followed by the sounds of an argument—Ashe quickens his pace, only to hear shuffling and grunting in the next one he passes, along with the high-pitched yowl of a cat. Even the sky isn’t on his side—the clouds have blocked out the moon for tonight, leaving Ashe with barely anything to see by. He’s pretty sure he’s stepped on at least two dead rats by now.

“Hey. You.”

Ashe keeps walking.

“ _Hey,_ ” the voice from behind growls, “you with the box. Don’t fuckin’ ignore me.”

Ashe is tempted to keep walking, but the possibility that he’ll get a bullet lodged in his ribcage for his troubles has him reluctantly stopping and turning around—three thugs are heading his way, all of them dressed in ratty street clothes and ripped leather jackets. _On an August night? That must be sweltering,_ Ashe thinks. “How can I help you?”

The men exchange looks. “ _How can I help you?_ ” one of them mimics, sending up a rally of snickers among the three. Ashe barely refrains from rolling his eyes. “Hand over your money, punk. And whatever the hell that box is while you’re at it.”

“Why should I?” Ashe ventures, readying himself to break out in a run if he has to. He’s weak and he can’t fight, but he’s fast, and by this point he knows how to go around his battles.

“Why _should you?_ ” another man parrots incredulously. “You’re in our turf, headass. You think we’ll just let you walk away no problem and say sorry for takin’ up your time if you say no?” He has one hand shoved in the pocket of his jacket, and Ashe follows the movement—the gleam of a blade twinkles up at him. Figures. If he runs now, he might just be able to make it back to the station, where there are more security around…

The man’s arm moves again, seemingly to adjust his grip on his weapon, but Ashe’s eyes catch on the vague, dark shape of something on the man’s bicep. With the sleeves of the jacket ripped off, Ashe can just make out—

“A scorpion,” he realizes. The men blink. “You guys… work for Yuri?”

The effect is immediate—all three take a step back and away from him. “You know the boss?” one of them snaps. “Well, shit! Why didn’t you say so earlier? Now we look like a bunch’a right damn idiots!”

“Huh…?”

“Hey, don’t tell him ‘bout this, okay?” another one hisses, fear laced in his voice; he glances from side to side as if Yuri might emerge from one of the dark alleyways. “If he hears about us picking on one of his buddies, well… if he hears about it, that is…”

“That is what?” a different voice calls—the men actually _squeak,_ and the sound is disorienting coming from a trio of thugs who look like they could beat Ashe into a pulp if they wanted to. Yuri actually _does_ emerge from one of the dark alleyways, arms crossed over his chest and eyes narrowed in suspicion. “You guys…” He sighs. “What did I tell you about passersby?”

“We’re sorry, boss!” one man wails, bowing at a perfect right angle; the other two follow not a second later. “Don’t bother passersby unless they look rich! It won’t happen again! We’re sorry!”

Yuri shakes his head. “Whatever. Just scram.”

“Yes, boss!” they chorus, and the thugs, jabbing and elbowing each other, flee down into a side street.

An awkward moment of silence passes—Yuri’s staring after the men, pointedly avoiding Ashe’s gaze, until Ashe finally clears his throat and breaks the quiet. “Thanks for that,” he says, doing his best to sound marginally cheerful. “Is this really a gang? They all seem like pretty okay people.”

“Hell are you talking about? They tried to rob you.”

“You know what I mean.”

“They’re just spineless,” Yuri mutters. “All bark with half the bite. But that doesn’t matter. What are _you_ doing here?”

Ashe thinks he should feel threatened by the irritation in Yuri’s voice, but it’s difficult when Yuri won’t even meet his eyes. “I came here for you.”

“You—what?”

Confusion has Yuri turning to face Ashe at last, and Ashe extends his arms to present the box. “Happy birthday, Yuri,” he greets, hoping he doesn’t sound like he’s ready to start crying all over again at the thought that this is the first time he had ever been able to say the words to the person they’re meant for. “I baked you a cake.”

The longest seconds of Ashe’s life pass with Yuri staring blankly at him, then at the cake, then at him again, then at the cake again. Finally, just as Ashe’s arms are beginning to tire, Yuri says, “ _What?_ ”

“August 12,” Ashe says. He knows it’s late in the evening, but it’s not that late that it’s already the 13th. “Your birthday.”

“No one knows my birthday.”

“I do.” Ashe frowns. “I remember. It was forever ago, but I remember. You wrote it down on a class record. August 12,” he repeats, as if that might solidify the fact. He can accept Yuri as a fake name, but he can’t accept this date as a fake birthday. That might just be too much.

Yuri looks absolutely baffled. “What the fuck—how the hell do you even remember that?”

“It’s hard to forget.” Ashe swallows. “It was at the start of the school year.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t know you—dropped out. I just thought it was like another one of your long absences. So I baked a cake too, and brought it to school to give you.” Ashe stops there—Yuri can figure out the rest. When Yuri still doesn’t respond, though, just stares down at the cake box like it’s something alien, Ashe nudges it forward. “Come on, just take it. I promise it’s not poiso—”

“Why?” Yuri snaps, stepping forward, his arms tense and looking ready to strike—Ashe pulls the box back, but doesn’t retreat himself. “Why are you back? Why do you care about my birthday? What did I ever do to make you—make you— _care?_ ”

He says the last word so brokenly that Ashe doesn’t think he’s ever seen Yuri look this genuinely _distraught_ over, of all things, a birthday cake. “Of course I care,” Ashe whispers, stepping closer, slow and deliberate enough that Yuri can back away if he wants to. He doesn’t. “You don’t need to have done anything for me to care about you, Yuri. I just do.”

“But—” Yuri scowls. “I can’t accept this. I need to pay you back for it somehow.”

“No, you don’t,” Ashe patiently tells him. “It’s a gift. A _birthday_ gift. I’m not expecting anything back. I don’t _want_ anything back.”

“Bullshit,” Yuri returns, voice cold. “No one gives anything without expecting something back. This world is give-and-take. I pay back my debts, but I sure hate having them at all in the first place. Don’t feed me the same drivel about caring about each other unconditionally, ‘cause all that does is piss me the hell off.”

Instead of scaring Ashe off, like he suspects Yuri was aiming for, all it does is annoy him to no end. “Why do you—I get that you haven’t lived a great life—”

“Wow, no _shit._ ”

“—but you can’t just _drive me away_ like this,” Ashe presses—there’s a convenient bench just beside them, and he drops the box there before stalking back over to Yuri, who’s still glaring at him like he’s the dirt beneath his shoes. “You didn’t _force_ me to care about you. Why do you even think I’m expecting you to do something in return just for this? Do you think me making you dinner everyday was some sort of give-and-take relationship?”

“That—” Yuri visibly blanches, and Ashe zeroes in on the detail like he’s looking for cracks in his stubborn, impenetrable armor. “Ashe, just… listen, okay? My point is—you have no reason to give a shit about me. We were friends when we were kids, and that’s it. I’m not the same person I was before.”

“You think I don’t know that?” _You think that changes anything?_

Yuri looks close to tearing his hair out in frustration. “I’m asking you again—why the hell would you care about me? What’s _there_ to care about!?”

In that moment, all Ashe registers is his blood roaring in his ears—he steps forward, close enough that their noses are nearly touching, and shouts for all the neighborhood to hear, “Because I _love_ you!”

Silence, again. Yuri’s eyes have gone wide, his angered expression crumbling to give way to shock, and he’s frozen in place—Ashe, meanwhile, only meets his eyes head-on with a glare of his own. His tongue feels numb from the words—had he really said them? Had Yuri actually heard them? It doesn’t feel real just yet, and Ashe pushes away the rapidly sinking feeling in his chest to focus on the here and now first. He can wallow in self-pity later on.

“No,” Yuri finally breathes, tearing his gaze away from Ashe, “you don’t. You _can’t._ ”

“W— _What?_ ”

“What’s there to love in someone like _me?_ ” Yuri sneers, lips curling downwards. Only he could make such a disgusted expression look graceful still. “I’m a criminal and a murderer and a shit ton of other things you don’t need to know about, Ashe. Don’t tell me you _love_ me—” He says the word as if it’s something utterly revolting—“if you just mean you _want_ something from me.”

Ashe’s fists are clenched tight enough that any further and he risks breaking the skin on his palm. “Do you even hear yourself right now?” he asks—he means for it to come out harder, angrier, but instead he just sounds weary. “I meant what I said. I don’t want anything from you. I just want…”

_I just want to read notes at breakfast, to eat dinner together every night, to hear you go through a never-ending list of bird names—I just want to see your smile and the way your eyes slant upwards whenever you laugh—_

“I just want you to be you,” Ashe finishes. Now he’s the one who can’t bring himself to make eye contact. “I want Yuri to be Yuri. That’s… That’s all.”

A pause. “Ashe, I…”

“I’m—it’s okay if you don’t,” Ashe stammers. “Feel the same, I mean. I just felt like I should tell you. And… you know, to clear things up, about that night, because I think there were a lot of misunderstandings and stuff…” What the hell is he even saying by this point?

“But you—you said you didn’t want me.”

Ashe blinks, looking up. Yuri looks more confused than anything now. “What?”

“You said you don’t want me,” Yuri repeats. There’s uncertainty in every syllable he speaks, and his brows are furrowed in bewilderment. “When I kissed you. That’s why I…”

“I meant that I wanted you to—to kiss me,” Ashe says, feeling his cheeks burn up, “without feeling like you were just doing it to pay me back for… whatever.” He can’t even remember what Yuri had thought he owed Ashe anymore. Either his memory is failing or it was just such a weird conclusion Yuri had jumped to that Ashe had subconsciously decided to forget it entirely. “I _do_ want you. But only if you want me, too, and you’re not just doing it like I’m part of a job.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, _oh._ ”

Yuri looks down at the pavement, and Ashe doesn’t need much light to see his hands shaking at his sides. “You’re not lying, are you?” he whispers. “You’re not just saying it? You… love me… just for nothing?”

“Not for nothing.” Ashe shakes his head. “I love you for you.” It’s a little embarrassing to say aloud, but he doesn’t think he’s ever meant anything as much as those words. If he’s being honest, he doesn’t know if _love_ encompasses all his emotions for Yuri, all the feelings he’d attached to him over the years—because Yuri used to feel like a dream of a dream, the specific details gone by first sign of daylight. They were memories that faded over time until Ashe was grasping at air by late high school, only the warmth of friendship and familiarity staying with him as a memento.

Then Yuri returned, and it began feeling like a recurring dream instead—seeing a flash of lavender in the corner of his eye everywhere Ashe looked during the day, and coming home to shining eyes and a set dining table in the evening. A dream so fragile he could wake from it at any moment and not even realize he was already awake until the sunrays had chased away all but the vague feeling in his chest that something, someone, was missing.

And now… where is he? Standing on the threshold between awake and asleep, his eyelids beginning to twitch, the sunlight trickling in from the windows. His dreams, waiting to see if this is one battle he can win without anyone else’s help.

“You promise,” Yuri murmurs, glancing up. His eyes are glimmering with the promise of tears that Ashe is sure matches his own.

Ashe moves closer, closer, his arm slowly rising but never touching until Yuri nods—only then does Ashe carefully rest his hand against Yuri’s cheek, like how Yuri had held his face on that night. “Promise.”

Yuri kisses him first again, leaning forward and pressing their lips together, but this time there’s no frantic, frenetic heat, no greedy tongues and hungry hands trying to swallow up everything in their wake. Ashe closes his eyes, tilts his head just slightly—Yuri’s lips are dry and bitten warm, and he tastes faintly of cherry lip balm. A moment later, he tastes of saltwater, too.

Yuri’s hand gropes blindly around until it finds Ashe’s, and Yuri intertwines their fingers together in a shaky grip. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, drawing back just slightly so that he’s nearly speaking right against Ashe’s mouth. “I’m sorry I left, I’m sorry I took so long to come back, I… I don’t… I’m sorry,” he repeats, and his voice catches on a choked sob when Ashe leans in to kiss his tears away. “I’m sorry. For loving you.”

“How is that something to be sorry for?” Ashe quietly asks.

“I told you. I’m a damn criminal.” Yuri laughs wetly, resting their foreheads together. “It’s not even like you _try_ to hide your identity. What am I going to do? What if you get hurt because of me? I—I can’t—”

“Yuri,” Ashe gently interrupts, lifting his other hand to brush against Yuri’s long hair. Yuri falls silent, leaning into Ashe’s touch. “It’s gonna be fine. Okay?”

He doesn’t offer reassurances that things like that will never happen, because they already have and he knows they will. But right now, hitmen and assassins are the absolute last things Ashe cares about—right now, he wants nothing more than to bring Yuri home and make them both dinner, and then maybe have a slice of birthday cake afterwards, because no way is Ashe going to work so hard for this silly cake just to _not_ have Yuri eat it.

Yuri sighs, then nods again. “Do you… wanna go home, or something?”

“When you say home—”

“I mean your apartment. What the hell. Do you think _my_ place is anywhere _near_ a home?”

Ashe laughs, but can’t bring himself to lie—as long as he’s with Yuri, what does it matter where they are? He doesn’t have to dream anymore, doesn’t even have to be awake, to know this is as real as it gets. “Okay. Okay, let’s go home, Yuri. I have some sweet buns in the fridge, if you want them?”

Yuri huffs out his own laugh, wrapping his arms around Ashe’s neck and pressing another chaste kiss to his lips. “Whatever you want, lovebird.”

People go their separate ways. Ashe knows this. But sometimes they come back, too—and sometimes, they stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: [BECAUSE I LOVE YOU!!!](https://twitter.com/froggiecafe/status/1268563766653804545) i love u so much mik THANK YOU!!!

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading (❁´◡`❁) if you liked this, check out [this tweet](https://twitter.com/featherxs/status/1239788477807349760)!
> 
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